Paul Klee : Philosophical Vision, from Nature To

edited by John Sallis McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College [This blank page deliberately inserted by Boston College Digital Libraries staff to preserve the openings of the analog book.] edited by John Sallis

McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College

Distributed by The University of Chicago Press 0

This publication is issued in conjunction with the exhibition Paul Klee: Philosophical Vision; From Nature to Art at the McMullen Museum

of Art, Boston College, September 1 - December 9, 2012.

Organized by the McMullen Museum, in collaboration with the Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, Paul Klee: Philosophical Vision; From Nature

to Art has been curated by John Sallis in consultation with Claude Cernuschi and Jeffery Howe. The exhibition has been underwrit-

ten by Boston College, the Patrons of the McMullen Museum, and the Newton College Class of 1967, with additional support from

swissnex Boston and Swiss International Air Lines Ltd.

S* ^3Swiss

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012939001 ISBN: 978-1-892850-19-5

Distributed by The University of Chicago Press

Printed in the United States of America

Copyeditor: Kate Shugert Book designer: John McCoy

Front cover: Paul Klee, Wall Plant ( Mauerpflanze ), 1922/153. Watercolor and pen on paper on cardboard, 25.8 x 30.2 cm,

Back cover: Paul Klee, Eidola: Erstwhile Philosopher (EIAQAA: weiland Philosoph ), 1940/101. Chalk on paper on cardboard, 29.7 x 21 cm, Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, PKS Z 2128.

Photo credits: Art Resource, NY © The Metropolitan Museum of Art: plate 13; Kerry Burke (Boston College): plate 5; Imaging De-

partment © President and Fellows of Harvard College (Harvard Art Museums): plates 3 -4, 15, 18, 21 -24, 28, 61, 64; Petegorsky/

Gipe (Smith College Museum of Art): plates 7, 12; SCALA/Art Resource, NY © The Museum of Modern Art: plates 34, 37, 55, 65; Peter Schibli (Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel): plate 45; Laura Shea (Mount Holyoke College Art Museum): plates 33, 63; Peter

Siegel (Colby College Museum of Art): plate 6.

This publication is funded in part by the Peggy Simons Memorial Publications Fund

- PEGGY SIMONS memorial If PUBUCAT1C3KS KVM> // Contents

Nancy Netzer Director's Preface 5

John Sallis Introduction 7

Paul Klee On Modern Art 9

John Sallis Klee's Philosophical Vision 15

Alejandro Arturo Vallega Paul Klee's Vision of an Originary Cosmological Painting 25

Claudia Baracchi Paul Klee: Self-Portrait of the Artist as a Tree 35

David Farrell Krell Klee and Novalis: Apprentices at SaVs 45

Dennis J. Schmidt Paul Klee and the Writing of Life 55

Charles W. Haxthausen "Abstract with Memories": Klee's "Auratic" Pictures 61

Marfa del Rosario Acosta Framing Klee's Window 77

Galen A. Johnson Metamorphosis and Music: Klee and Merleau-Ponty 85

3 Gunter Figal Pictorial Spaces: The Art of Paul Klee 99

Claude Cernuschi Paul Klee and Language 105

Eliane Escoubas A Polyphonic Painting: Paul Klee and Rhythm 135

Marcia Sa Cavalcante Schuback The Poetics of the Sketch 149

Damir Barbaric The Look from Beyond: On Paul Klee's View of Art 157

Jeffery Howe Paul Klee and the Unseen World: Ghosts, Somnambulists, and Witches 165

Stephen H. Watson The Sublime Continuum: Klee's Cosmic Simultaneities 185

Plates 197

Index 263

Contributors 267

4 Nancy Netzer Director's Preface

In the fall of 2008, my colleague John Sa Mis in the Philosophy Department came to talk about his plans to organize an international conference at Boston College on the philosophical vision of Paul Klee, an artist who had been a mainstay of his scholarly inquiry for many years. He wondered if the McMullen Museum might mount a small display of Klee's works to coincide with the gathering. In a matter of minutes, after hearing the scope of the new research being undertaken, it became clear that the McMullen should try to organize not a small, but rather a major interdisciplinary exhibition exploring Klee's role in the world of philosophy—something that had never been attempted. John Sa Mis immediately agreed to serve as cura- tor and to contact scholars at the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern. Juri Steiner, then the Director, and Michael

Baumgartner, the Zentrum's Director of Research, responded with enthusiasm, generously agreeing to collaborate on the project and to lend a large number of Klee's works to the exhibition. Art historian Gottfried

Boehm at the University of Basel also offered to help with securing loans. Meanwhile, at Boston College, art historians Claude Cernuschi and Jeffery Howe of the Fine Arts Department began working with Sa Mis as consulting curators and contributors of essays for this catalogue to accompany the exhibition. In the latter task, they were joined by art historian Charles W. Haxthausen and philosophers Maria del Rosario Acosta,

Claudia Baracchi, Damir Barbaric, Eliane Escoubas, Gunter Figal, Galen A. Johnson, David Farrell Krell,

Dennis J. Schmidt, Marcia Sa Cavalcante Schuback, Alejandro Arturo Vallega, and Stephen H. Watson.

Our principal debt of gratitude is to John Sa Mis. His vision for exploring how philosophical ideas conceived in Klee's writings and lectures were translated by the artist into line and color underlies all aspects of the exhibition and this volume. Sallis's mastery of the field, his years of dialogue with colleagues around the world, and his generous, engaging, and open manner have borne fruit in this endeavor and made it an enjoyable experience for everyone involved. It is with equal admiration, both scholarly and personal, that we thank our two colleagues Claude Cernuschi and Jeffery Howe. We also extend special thanks to Deputy

Director/Consul Andreas Rufer of swissnex Boston and to Paul Klee's grandson Alexander Klee and his family, without whose assistance and support we could not have undertaken this project.

Of course, none of this could have been accomplished without the contribution of colleagues at the

McMullen Museum, across Boston College, and beyond. Diana Larsen designed the galleries to evoke the aesthetic of those in which Klee exhibited his work. In designing this catalogue and the exhibition's graph- ics and website, John McCoy echoed the Bauhaus style of the years when Klee taught at that school in

Weimar and Dessau. Kate Shugert organized loans and photography, and she copyedited with extraordinary discernment the essays in this publication. Nancy Fedrow, John Sallis's assistant, contributed editorial and organizational assistance. Kerry Burke provided photographs and Jon K. Burmeister produced the catalogue's index. Interns Francesca Falzone, Liah Luther, Lauren Passaro, Molly Phelps, Emilie Sintobin, and Christina Tully helped with proofreading and loan processing. Anastos Chiavaras and Rose Breen from Boston College's Office of Risk Management provided valuable guidance regarding insurance. We are grateful to the University's Advancement Office—especially James Husson, Thomas Lockerby, Catherine

Concannon, Mary Lou Crane, and Ginger Saariaho—for aiding funding efforts. 5 Friends and colleagues at other institutions assisted with loans and photographs: Amy Ryan, Susan Glover, and Karen Shafts

(Boston Public Library); Sharon Corwin and Patricia King (Colby

College Museum of Art); Nannette V. Maciejunes, Melinda

Knapp, Jennifer Seeds, and Stefanie Wolf (Columbus Museum of

Art); Lisa Fischman, Sandra Hachey, and Bo K. Mompho (Davis

Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College); Sam Keller and Tanja Narr (Fondation Beyeler); Thomas W. Lentz, Mary

Schneider Enriquez, Francine Flynn, Sarah Kianovsky, Nicole

Linderman-Moss, Christopher Linnane, and Lynette Roth (Harvard Art Museums); William Stoneman, Hope Mayo, and Carie

McGinnis (Houghton Library, Harvard University); Thomas P.

Campbell, Emily Foss, and Gary Tinterow (Metropolitan Museum of Art); John R. Stomberg, Rachel Beaupre, and Wendy Watson

(Mount Holyoke College Art Museum); Malcolm Rogers, Clifford

Ackley, Marta Fodor, Patrick Murphy, Kim Pashko, and Stephanie

Loeb Stepanek (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston); Glenn D. Lowry,

Katherine Alcauskas, and Eliza Frecon (Museum of Modern

Art, NY); Dorothy Kosinski, Joe Holbach, and Gretchen Martin

(Phillips Collection, Washington, DC); Brent R. Benjamin, Diane

Mallow, and Shannon Sweeney (Saint Louis Art Museum); Jessica

F. Nicoll, Aprile Gallant, Louise Laplante, and Kathryn Kearns

(Smith College Museum of Art); and Peter Fischer, Juri Steiner,

Ursina Barandun, Michael Baumgartner, Heidi Frautschi, Edith

Heinimann, and Myriam Weber (Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern). The McMullen could not have undertaken such a complex project of international scope were it not for the continued gener- osity of the administration of Boston College and the McMullen family. We especially thank President William P. Leahy, SJ; Provost

Cutberto Garza; Chancellor J. Donald Monan, SJ; Vice-Provost

Patricia DeLeeuw; Dean of Arts and Sciences David Quigley; and Institute of Liberal Arts Director Mary Crane. Major support for the exhibition was provided by the Patrons of the McMullen

Museum, chaired by C. Michael Daley, and the Newton College

Class of 1967. Additional support was provided by swissnex

Boston and Swiss International Air Lines Ltd. This publication is underwritten in part by the fund named in memory of our late, and much beloved, docent Peggy Simons, an enthusiast of cross- disciplinary inquiry into works of art. To all mentioned above we extend heartfelt thanks.

Nancy Netzer, Director and Professor of Art History John Sallis Introduction

Although recognition of Paul Klee's artistic accomplishments has never really waned, a new wave of

interest in his work arose in the first decade of this century. Major exhibitions were mounted in Paris, Basel,

Frankfurt, Tubingen, and several other cities. The year 2005 brought the opening in Bern of the new Zentrum

Paul Klee, designed by architect Renzo Piano. This facility now houses the largest collection of works by Klee

(over four thousand works), many of which were donated or given on permanent loan by Livia Klee-Meyer,

Paul and Lily Klee's daughter-in-law, and Alexander Klee, their grandson. In addition, the Zentrum Paul Klee

functions as a repository for Klee's personal library and for documents concerning his life and his art. The

facility has thus served to spur research dealing with various aspects of Klee's career and works.

In view of these developments in Europe, it seemed appropriate to explore the possibility of an event

in Boston centered on the art of Paul Klee. After Nancy Netzer and others at Boston College offered

generous encouragement and collaboration, I contacted Michael Baumgartner, Director of Research at

the Zentrum Paul Klee, and requested a meeting with him and his colleagues to discuss the idea of a Klee

exhibition at the McMullen Museum of Art at Boston College. In June 2009, I traveled to Bern for an exten-

sive meeting with Dr. Baumgartner; he proved entirely receptive and offered both generous collaboration

and detailed advice as to how the exhibition could be arranged. At the University of Basel, I spoke with

Gottfried Boehm, director of the Swiss national research project "Eikones/NCCR Iconic Criticism," and he,

too, offered encouragement and support. After my return to Boston, I began a series of discussions with

Nancy Netzer and her staff at the McMullen Museum of Art; two colleagues from the Fine Arts Department,

Claude Cernuschi and Jeffery Howe, joined these discussions and contributed significantly to the planning

of the exhibition. Gradually the plans for the event began to take shape.

The basic idea was to focus on the philosophical dimension of Klee's work, something that no other

exhibition had done. The primary aim would be to examine and demonstrate how ideas developed in Klee's

writings and lectures are realized in his works of art. The themes that were to be taken up extend from that

of the artist's relation with nature to Klee's conception of the nature of art and of its relation to philosophy.

This range of themes is beautifully adumbrated in Klee's 1922 watercolor Wall Plant Mauerpflanze ( )

(front cover and plate 2). The work displays several images of natural, growing things, including most promi-

nently a plant articulated into its several levels of growth. There are indications both of the root structure that

nourishes its growth and, especially by means of color, of the sunlight essential to its growth. The picture

constitutes a transformation of nature into art, which makes visible all that belongs to vegetative genesis.

Within the same frame, it juxtaposes vegetative life to something eminently fabricated and restrictive; in the

duality expressed in the title Wall Plant, it broaches in the medium of art the encounter between nature and

the human, which recent philosophers address as the question of the impact of technology. In addition, by

picturing vegetative growth as it does, the work prompts comparison with Klee's description of art itself by

means of the metaphor of a tree. It is with this paradigmatic description that Klee begins his most seminal

essay "On Modern Art," newly translated by David Farrell Krell for the present volume.

Within the broad scope expressed by the phrase "from nature to art," several more specific themes— 7 some evident in Wall Plant—are pertinent. Most basic among Larsen, and John McCoy, with whom it has been a pleasure to

these are Klee's ideas concerning the genesis of natural things collaborate. I want to express my gratitude to the authors of the and their relation to a primal ground. Closely related to these essays in this catalogue for offering their insights into Klee's work ideas are his thoughts about the nature of space, time, and move- and providing thereby a basis for further discussion and appre- ment and about the interrelation between these moments that ciation of Klee's achievements. Thanks also to Nancy Fedrow, occurs in works of visual art. Marina Denischik, Peter Hanly, Nicholas Sallis, and Jon K.

As both a poet and a musician, Klee developed original ideas Burmeister for their very capable assistance. about the relation of drawing and painting to words and music.

In many of his works, elements of script are inscribed along with drawn or painted images, to say nothing of the highly poetic titles that he invented for many of his works and the manifest musicality that many display.

Klee's conception of human existence, attested concretely in his diaries, is, at once, both original and responsive to classical texts such as the Greek tragedies that he read so avidly. These thoughts became paramount after the Nazis came to power, and while they went largely unwritten, Klee expressed them powerfully in a series of more than two hundred satirical drawings produced in 1933.

Klee's conception of the nature of art is to be found throughout his published essays and his Bauhaus lectures. Yet its most succinct statement lies in the celebrated remark with which he opens his essay "Creative Credo": "Art does not reproduce the visible but makes visible."

In addition to considering Klee's own ideas as they guide and are developed in his artistic work, this exhibition and the essays in this catalogue explore the reception of Klee's work by a number of major philosophers. The list includes Walter Benjamin,

Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and others. In every case the question is: what do the philosophers discern in Klee's work and how do they regard his art as complementing their thought?

The following essays explore this broad array of themes and questions. Among the contributors there are both philosophers and art historians, and on both sides they approach Klee's work from a variety of perspectives. Several of the essays explore the relation between Klee's work and that of particular philosophers or philosopher-poets such as Merleau-Ponty, Novalis, Benjamin, and Heidegger. Others focus on the way that certain of Klee's ideas—concerning space, language, rhythm, temporality—are carried out concretely in his artistic work. Still others focus on the cosmological dimension in Klee's thought and works, on his very distinctive sense of simile and metaphor, and on his conception of visibility and its relation to the invisible.

Taken as a whole, the collection is intended to provide a comprehensive assessment of the philosophical dimension of Klee's art and thought. To this end, the essays draw extensively both from Klee's own writings (his essays, lectures, and diaries) and from the art-historical scholarship concerning Klee's theoretical and artistic work. In addition, many of them take up the insights into Klee's work found in the writings of various philosophers and reexamine Klee's art and thought in the light of these insights.

I am grateful to Nancy Netzer for her continual encouragement, strong support, and expert advice, as well as to the very able staff of the McMullen Museum of Art, Kate Shugert, Diana Paul Klee On Modern Art

Distinguished Ladies and Gentlemen! 1

If I now take the floor, standing close by some of my own work, and speak about that work, even though

the work ought to speak for itself in its own language, I confess to a certain unease about whether there are

sufficient reasons for my saying anything at all, and also whether I will say it in the right way.

For even though as a painter I feel myself to be in possession of the means, my own means, to set others in

motion so that they will head in the same direction in which I feel myself driven, I do not feel as though I have

been given the gift of words, at least not with the same sort of assurance, words by which to point us toward the proper paths.

Yet I console myself by noting that it is not my talk in isolation that addresses you, that the talk is meant

merely to complement the impressions you yourselves will gain of my images; perhaps my words will provide

certain coinages that otherwise might go missing.

If I should succeed in this, to some extent at least, then I will respect the good sense of my having taken up the assigned task of addressing you.

In order to avoid even further the odium that is captured in the expression, "Artist, make art, don't talk," I would like to volunteer some observations on the creative process; during the period in which a work receives

its shape this process goes on more or less preconsciously. In my own subjective view, that is the only real jus-

tification for speeches by one who makes art, namely, to alter one's focus by finding new ways to observe. In

other words, to take some of the pressure off the formal side of things, which is consciously overburdened, by

developing a new kind of intuition, and to try to emphasize somewhat more the content aspect. Reestablishing

the equilibrium in this way would be exciting for me, and it would bring me much closer to a confrontation with

art by means of words and concepts.

However, I would be thinking too selfishly here; I would be forgetting that most of you are probably more

at home on the content side of things, less so on the formal side. And so I cannot really avoid saying something

to you about these formal things.

I would therefore like to offer you a peek into the painter's workshop, and if we can do that, we will come

to understand one another in other respects as well.

Some sort of common ground must exist between artists and others, a place where we can approach one

another mutually, a common ground on which the artist need no longer appear to be a matter quite apart.

Where he may rather appear as a creature who, like you, did not ask to be dropped into this multifarious

world of ours and who must make his or her way through it all just as you must.

Who may be different from you merely because of the specific means he has been given to rescue himself,

so that sometimes he may be more fortunate than a person who cannot create at all, a person who can never

1 Paul Klee delivered this lecture on January 26, 1 924, at the Jena Kunstverein exhibition of his works. A facsimile and transcription

of the original lecture appear in Paul Klee in Jena 1924: Der Vortrag, exh. cat. (Gera: Druckhaus Gera, 1999), 1 1 -69. The text

would not be published until 1945, with the lecture thenceforth titled "Uber die moderne Kunst." This translation is published with the permission of the Zentrum Paul Klee. 9 arrive at the point where he can give things real form and in this In spite of this glaring inadequacy, we have to involve our- way save himself. selves in a thoroughgoing way with the parts.

You really must be content to grant the artist this one relative Yet as we work through each part, where we will already have advantage, because in other respects he has a tough enough time. many aspects we have to consider, we must remain conscious of

the fact that we are dealing with a mere part, so that we do not

grow faint-hearted when treatment of new parts takes us in very

different directions and into other dimensions, leading us off the

Allow me to employ a simile—that of a tree. The artist has come beaten track, as it were, so that our memory of the dimensions to grips with this multifarious world, and we would like to think that treated earlier may readily fade. he has made his way through it somewhat successfully, albeit very To each dimension that evanesces in time we should say, "You quietly. He has such good orientation in it that he is able to bring will now become the past; and yet every now and again as we order to the flux of appearances and experiences. This orientation pursue our new dimension we will stumble onto a critical place, in the things of nature and of life, this order with all its limbs and perhaps a fortunate place, which will restore your present to you."

branches, I would like to compare to the root structure of the tree. And if it should turn out to be increasingly difficult to make

From that structure juices flow upward to the artist, passing present to ourselves more and more of these dimensions, to hold through him, through his eye. together the different parts of this articulated structure, that only

He is therefore standing in the place of the trunk. means that we will have to be very patient.

Moved and compelled by the power of those streaming juices, A long time ago the so-called spatial arts succeeded in hold- he conducts what he is looking at into the work. ing together this simultaneously multidimensional phenomenon.

Like the crown of the tree, unfolding into visibility in every direc- The temporal art of music also created for itself the pregnant tion through time and space, that is how it also goes with the work. reverberations of polyphony, and such holding together enabled

It would not occur to anyone to demand of the tree that it drama to achieve its high points; but in the areas where words shape its crown exactly like its root structure. Everyone will under- prevail, and where we must do our teaching, it is unfortunately stand that the below and the above cannot mirror one another per- unknown. Contact between the dimensions has to enter from the fectly. It is clear that over time the different functions in the various outside here—after the fact.

elemental realms will diverge from one another in quite vital ways. And yet perhaps I can still make myself understood to this

Yet from time to time people have wanted to forbid the art- extent, that one or other work better lends itself to an experience ist these divergences from the given models, divergences that are of the phenomenon of multidimensional contact. necessary to the artistic process. Some people have been so out- As a modest mediator, who does not identify himself with the

raged that they accuse the artist of total incompetence or deliber- crown, I may still be allowed to grant you a view of a richly radiat- ate falsification. ing light.

And yet, in the place that has been assigned to him, at the trunk, he is doing no more than gathering and conducting whatever it is that comes to him from the depths. He neither serves nor rules, but merely mediates. Now to the thing itself, to the dimensions of the image.

He occupies a truly modest position. And the beauty of the Earlier I spoke of the relation of crown to root, or of work to crown is not he himself, but what has merely passed through him. nature, explaining the difference in terms of the two realms of earth

and air and with the correspondingly different functions of depth

and height.

With the work of art, which was compared to the crown, it is a

Before I begin to explain the realms I was comparing to crown matter of the deformational necessity of entering into the specific

and root, I have to confess to some more doubts. dimensions of the pictorial. For the rebirth of nature tends in that

It is not easy to find one's way in a whole that is composed of direction. various members that, in turn, pertain to different dimensions. And What, then, are these specific dimensions? such wholes are both nature and nature's altered image—art. Here we find what are at first more or less limited, formal things,

It is difficult to get an overview of such a whole, whether of like lines, bright and dark tones, and color. nature or art, and it is still more difficult to help someone else attain The most limited thing is the line, which is an affair of measure such a prospect. alone. Whatever way the line behaves, it is always a matter of

The reason for this lies in the temporally distinct methods—the longer or shorter stretches, of angles more acute or more obtuse, only methods we are ever given—of treating a spatial image, of larger or smaller arcs, of distances between foci. Always and treating it in such a way that a clear and plastic presentation of it everywhere something measurable! results. And the reason for that is a lack in the temporal aspect of Measure is the earmark of this element, and if the measurability language. becomes dubious, then one has not been dealing with the line in

For we lack the means to discuss synthetically a multidimen- an absolutely pure manner. sional simultaneity. Matters are different with tonalities, or, as we also call them, lighter or darker tones, the whole scale of differences between What sort of ordering, now, is appropriate to the essence of

black and white. In this second element we find ourselves among pure color? In what sort of ordering does its essence best express

questions of weight. One degree is more dense or more free with itself? white energy, the other degree is more burdened by black or less In the well-constructed disc, the form that is best able to say

so. One can weigh the different degrees against one another. In something essential about the reciprocal relations of the colors.

addition, it is a matter of black upon the white norm (on a white Its clear center, the capacity of its periphery to be divided by

background), or white in relation to the black norm (on a black- six radii, the image of the three diameters created by these six

board), or both together in relation to a mediating gray norm. points of intersection: these are the areas of special interest on the

Third, colors, which obviously demonstrate characteristics very showplace of chromatic relationships.

different from the above. For one does not altogether get to them These relationships are, first of all, diametrical; and just as there

through measuring or weighing: there where no ruler or scale can are three diameters here, so are there also three principal diametri-

clearly mark a difference, for example, the difference between a cally opposed relationships, which we call red/green, yellow/vio-

pure yellow and a pure red surface of the same dimensions and let, and blue/orange. (Or, in other words, the most important pairs

with the same degree of brightness, there still remains an essential of complementary colors.)

difference, the difference we designate with the words Yellow and As we move along the periphery, each major or primary color

Red. meets its most important secondary or mixed color; these mixed

Just so, one can readily compare salt and sugar, understand- colors (three in number) come to lie in between their proper com-

ing everything except their saltiness and sweetness. ponents, the primary colors, green between yellow and blue, vio-

I would therefore like to call colors qualities. let between red and blue, and orange between yellow and red.

Accordingly, we have the formal means of measure, weight, The complementary pairs that are bound together by the diam-

and quality, which, while fundamentally different, still entertain eters destroy one another chromatically when they move in the

certain relations with one another. diametrically opposed direction and thus mix to gray. The fact

The nature of their interconnection will emerge from the follow- that this is true for all three suggests that the point of intersection

ing brief investigation. common to the three diameters, their halfway point, constitutes the

Color is first of all quality. Second, it is weight, because it pos- gray center of the chromatic disc.

sesses not only a chromatic value but also a brightness value. But now a triangle can be constructed through the midpoints of

Third, color is also measure, because in addition to the previous the three primary colors, yellow, red, and blue; the vertices of the

values it also has its limits, its scope, its extension, its measurability. triangle would be at the midpoint of the arcs of the primary colors

Chiaroscuro is in the first place weight, and, in its extension, themselves, but their sides would pass through the mixtures of the

or perhaps within its limits, it is in the second place measure. two primary colors leading up to the vertex, so that on this triangle

However, the line is measure alone. the green side would lie opposite the red point, the violet side

Thus we have been making judgments on the basis of three would lie opposite the yellow point, and the orange side would lie

guidelines, all of which are tangent to the circle of fully cultivated opposite the blue point.

color; two of those guidelines apply to pure chiaroscuro, whereas Accordingly, there are three primary colors and three principal

only one of them stretches across the region of the pure line. neighboring colors, or six principal neighboring colors, or three-

The three guidelines-depending upon the degree of their par- times-two related colors (chromatic pairs).

ticipation—constitute three interpenetrating regions, as it were. The

largest region contains three guidelines, the middle one two, and

the smallest but one.

(On the basis of this we can perhaps best understand Max Abandoning this elementary, formal region, I come now to the

Liebermann's remark that sketching is the art of leaving things out.) first constructions made on the basis of the enumerated elements

We are able to make out a well-articulated structure of inter- in the three categories.

penetration here, and accordingly it is only logical that we should Here lies the focal point of our conscious creative process.

want to preserve the appropriate tidiness when dealing with these Around this point our professional activity is gathered. Here

various formal means. The possibilities for combination are cer- matters are critical.

tainly abundant enough. On this basis, if we can master these means, we can with assur-

We would want to operate by muddying only when a special ance shape things so reliably that we will be able to advance

inner need calls for it, understanding by this the application of toward farther dimensions, dimensions more distant from our con-

colored lines or very pale lines, or also the application of other scious involvement with things.

sorts of turbidity, such as those gray hues that so readily oscillate The same critical significance comes to this stage of construc-

between a yellow and a blue tone. The ordering symbol of the tion in a negative sense: here is also the place where we will not

essence of the pure line is the linear ruler with its variously marked achieve the grandest and weightiest content, and here is the place

lengths. where in spite of the most favorable psychic constitution, the one

The symbol of the essence of pure chiaroscuro is the scale that that would take us there, we founder. Because something is missing

is weighted by the various stages between white and black. precisely from our orientation on the formal level. To the extent that I can speak from my own experience, a dis- objects of his own passions. And yet I do have to concede that position may on occasion come to the creative person that will under some circumstances, whenever a face that is familiar to us allow him to invite some among the many elements to emerge from pops up in an image, we feel happy, sometimes very happy. their general order, invite them to step out of their well-appointed Images of objects look at us cheerfully or reproachfully, more sites, so that, working with one another, they may elevate them- or less tensely; they are prepared to console us richly or to frighten selves to a new order. us; they are full of suffering or smiles. In all the opposites that domi-

So that, working with one another, they construct something nate the psychological-physiognomic dimension, they look at us in one usually calls a figure or an object. ways that can stretch from the tragic to the comic.

This choice of the formal elements and the mode of their mutual But that is not the end of it, not by any means!

binding, which is limited to a very small range, is analogous to the The figures, as I have been calling these images of objects for musical thought between motif and theme. some time now, also have their particular posture, which results

Whenever such a construction gradually expands before our from the way one has set the chosen groups of elements into eyes, an association may quite readily join it, playing a role that motion. is something like that of an experimenter who tempts and attempts If a calm and self-possessed posture has been achieved, then objective interpretation. For every construction, if its articulation is the construction was striving to offer either no incrementation at all, complex, can with a bit of imagination be brought into comparison intending rather to present only established positions on the broad with some natural form. horizontal, or in the case of a vertical incrementation seeing to it

The associated properties of this constructed thing, once it has that the verticals are quite visible and consistent. been interpreted and named, no longer correspond entirely to the This firm posture can preserve its calm and yet still behave will of the artist (at least, not to the most intense site of this willing); somewhat more freely. The entire gesture can be transposed to an these associated properties are the source of the passionate misun- in-between sort of realm, such as water or the atmosphere, where derstandings that arise between artists and their public. no verticals dominate (as with swimming or floating).

Whereas for the artist it is all about striving to group the formal I say an in-between sort of realm in contrast to the first postural elements so purely and so logically together that each one is in its position, which is altogether earthbound. necessary place and none gets in the way of the other, someone In the case that follows, a new kind of posture emerges, one in the back of the room mutters the following catastrophic words: whose gestures are extremely lively, causing the posture to step

"But that doesn't look like Uncle Fred at all!" The artist, if his nerves outside itself. are well-steeled, thinks, "To hell with Uncle Fred, I've got to keep Why not?

working on this, I need to add some building blocks, but this new I have conceded that the justification for the concept of the block," he says to himself, "is really too heavy, it pulls the whole object lies in the image, so that we now have a new dimension.

business over to the left; I've got to add a counterweight over here By now I have indicated the formal elements one at a time and on the right, something significant, to get the balance back." also in their appropriate contexts.

Left and right he builds, adding this and that, until the arrow of I have also tried to make clear their stepping outside of their the scale finally hovers as it should. established positions.

And he is happy as a lark if he has had to shatter only a few of I have tried to make clear their coming on the scene as groups, the good elements that were there right at the very beginning, so and their initially limited but then somewhat more expanded col- that, with all the added contradictions and contrasts, everything at laboration in artistic constructions. some point belongs to a construction that is full of life. Constructions that we may call abstract, but that also may take

And yet. Sooner or later, even without that muttering from the on a certain concreteness, depending on the direction they follow back of the room, such associations can take place, and nothing once we have been lured by comparisons and associations by can stop the artist from yielding to them if they introduce them- way of names such as star, vase, plant, animal, head, or human selves with a name that sounds exactly right. being.

This objective yes-word then incites the addition of some sort These constructions corresponded in the first place with the of ingredient that seems to belong necessarily to the object once dimensions of the elementary means of pictorial formation, such it has been formulated. It stimulates the artist, if he is lucky, to add as line, chiaroscuro, and color. They then corresponded with the objective attributes to a spot that formally speaking was a bit first constructive interplay of these means in the dimension of the needy, so that it seems as though they always belonged there. figure or, if you like, the dimension of the object. A further dimen-

The quarrel has less to do with the question of the object's exis- sion comes to join these dimensions now, one that has everything tence and more to do with any given appearance of this object, to do with the question of content. with the kind of object it is. Certain relations of measure in lines, the juxtaposition of cer-

I dare to hope that any person who, when it comes to images, tain tones on the scale of chiaroscuro, and certain chromatic har- is on the hunt for an object he particularly loves gradually fades monies bring with them quite specific and very particular kinds of into extinction, at least in the region that surrounds me, and that expression. he comes to meet me at most as a ghost who does not know how For example, relations of measure in the linear region can go in to help himself. For this kind of person knows no more than the the direction of the angle: acutely angled zigzag motions, in contrast to a more horizontal course for the line, evoke correspond- the kind of romanticism that melts into the universe. ingly contrary resonances of expression. Thus the static and the dynamic portions of the mechanics of

Likewise, we see very different effects on the ideal side of artistic construction dovetail quite beautifully with the opposition of things resulting in the case of two different kinds of linear configu- the classic and the romantic. ration, one with firm contours, the other more free-flowing, more Our pictorial construction, as we have described it, runs dispersed. through so many important dimensions that it would not be fitting

Contrasting cases of expression in the region of chiaroscuro to still call it a construction. From now on we will be happy to are: bestow on it the resonant name composition.

Application of a wide range of all the tones from black to As for the dimensions, we will allow ourselves to be satisfied by white, which suggests energy and a full inhalation and exhalation; these abundant perspectives!

or a limited application of the upper half, the brighter half, of the scale—or of the lower and deeper half;

or application of the middle parts of that scale, those involving

gray, which suggests weakness through too much or too little light; I would now like to examine the dimension of the objective

or a hesitant dusk all about the middle. Those are hugely con- realm in and of itself and in a new sense, and thereby to try to trasting contents. show why the artist often undertakes such an apparently arbitrary

And think of the possibilities for varying the content once we "deformation" of the natural form of appearances. arrive at a juxtaposition of colors! For one thing, he does not grant these natural forms of appear-

For example, color as chiaroscuro: red on red, that is to say, ance the compelling significance they have for the numerous and the entire scale from red-manque to red-excess, in a broad or lim- loudly critical realists. He does not feel so bound by these realities, ited expanse of the scale. because he does not see in these culminating forms the essence

Then the same in yellow (which is something altogether differ- of the creative process of nature. More important to him than the ent), the same in blue—what opposites here! Or: diametrical col- culminating forms are the formative forces. ors, advancing from red to green, from yellow to violet, from blue He is perhaps, without really wanting to be, a philosopher. to orange: And if he does not declare, as the optimists do, that this is the best

Fragmentary worlds of content. of all possible worlds, he also does not say that the world around

Or: passages through color, through the segments of the chro- us is so squalid that one should never take it as an example. What matic disc, not directly touching the gray middle, but meeting one he rather says is this: another in a warmer or a cooler gray: what fine nuances in com- In this particular configuration, our world is not the only one parison with the prior contrasts! among all the worlds!

Or: passages through color along the periphery of the circle, Hence he descries the things formed by nature that pass before from yellow via orange to red, or from red via violet to blue, or on his eyes, examines them with a penetrating look. a broad expanse, over the entire scope of the disc: The more deeply he gazes, the easier it is for him to connect

What a cascade of stages, from the smallest step to a richly today's points of view with those of yesteryear. What imprints itself flowing symphony of color! What sundry perspectives in the on him, rather than the finished natural image, is the image of dimension of content! Creation as Genesis, for him the sole essential image.

Or, finally, passages through the totality of the chromatic order, He then allows himself the thought that the Creation can including the diametrical gray, and ultimately bound up with the scarcely have come to stop today, so that he extends the world- entire scale from black to white! creating activity from somewhere back there forward to the here

One can pass beyond these last-mentioned possibilities only and now, lending Genesis duration. by entering a new dimension. What could then come into ques- He goes farther. tion would be the place we would assign the assorted chromatic He says to himself, restricting himself to this world: Our world sounds. Indeed, each assortment would have its own possibilities once upon a time looked different, and it will look different again. of combination. And, leaning toward the Beyond, he opines: On other stars

And each configuration, each combination, will have its partic- things may have assumed very different forms. ular constructive expression, every figure its face, its physiognomy. Such mobility on the paths of natural Creation is a good school

Such compelling gestures point with special clarity into the of formation for him. dimension of style. Here romanticism, in its especially crass and It allows one who creates to move from the ground upward, bathetic phase, begins to stir. and, being himself mobile, he will be careful to let freedom prevail

This gesture wants to repel the Earth utterly, and the next ges- in the development of his paths of configuration. ture actually elevates itself beyond the Earth. It elevates itself by the Granted this way of approaching things, one must give him dictate of forces that hover, triumphant over the forces of gravity. the benefit of the doubt if he declares that the present stage of the

In the end I let these forces that are inimical to the Earth soar world of appearances, the one that happens to meet his eye, is out into the beyond, until they reach the point of the grand circula- inhibited by mere accident, inhibited temporally and spatially. He

tion; that way I pass beyond the style of bathos and compulsion to takes it to be all-too-limited in contrast to the world of which he has caught a glimpse that runs deeper, the world he has felt in a more more and more— animated way. To cultivate these pictorial means, to develop them purely and

And is it not true that even when we take the very small step to apply them purely. of looking through a microscope we see images right before our When people talk about the infantilism of my sketches, they eyes that, if we were not in on the game, if we saw them quite by must be taking as their point of departure those linear construc-

accident somewhere out there, we would all proclaim to be fantas- tions in which I was trying to connect an objective representation tic and extravagant? of, let us say, a human being, with a pure presentation of the linear

Meanwhile, Mr. X, coming across such an image in his daily element.

tabloid, would cry, "That's supposed to be a form of nature? It's a Had I wanted to render a human being "as he is," then I would botched piece of art!" have been using for this configuration such a befuddling confu-

So, then, is the artist to grapple with a microscope? With his- sion of lines that one could hardly speak of a pure, elementary tory? Paleontology? presentation; rather, it would have been a muddying to the point

Only by way of comparison, only in the direction of mobility. of unrecognizability.

And not in the direction of fidelity to a nature that is under scientific Furthermore, I do not really want to render the human being as control! he is, but rather in the way he might be.

Only in the direction of freedom. And so a connection between worldview and the pure practice

In the sense of a freedom that does not lead to determinate of art may succeed. phases of development, which were once exactly like this in nature And so it stands with the entire region of our involvement with or will be exactly like this, or might be like this on some other formal means; everywhere, also with colors, all muddying has to star (which perhaps one day we will be able to demonstrate), but be avoided. rather in the sense of a freedom that simply demands the right to That would also apply to the so-called untrue rendering of be as mobile as grand nature itself is mobile. color in recent art.

From modeled image to primordial image! As that "infantile" example tells you, I am inclined to present

Presumptuous fellow, this artist, who doubtless remains in hid- myself by way of partial operations:

ing all the while. Yet artists are called upon today to press forward, I am also a draughtsman.

to achieve some sort of proximity to that secret ground by which I tried pure drawing, I tried pure chiaroscuro painting, and

the primordial law nourishes every development. with color I tried all the partial operations to which my orientation,

There where the central organ of all temporal-spatial animated- guided by the chromatic disc, could give rise. So that I elaborated ness, whether we call it the brain or the heart of Creation, occa- the types of chromatically committed chiaroscuro painting, paint- sions all the functions: who as an artist would not want to dwell ing with complementary colors, painting with bright colors, and there? In the womb of nature, in the primal ground of Creation, painting with all colors. which holds the secret key to everything that is? In each case this was bound up with the rather subconscious

But not everyone should head there! Each person should move pictorial dimensions.

in the domain where the beat of his heart tells him he should move. Then I tried all the possible syntheses of any two types.

Thus in their own age, our antipodes of yesteryear, the impres- Combining and recombining, but, to be sure, always conserving as

sionists, quite rightly dwelled by the tender shoots and the ground- much as possible the pure element. Sometimes I dream of a work cover of everyday appearances. Our own pounding heart drives of enormous scope that would extend through all the regions, the us downward, down deep to the primal ground. elementary, objective, content-based, and stylistic.

Whatever grows out of this drive, whether it be called, as it That will certainly remain a dream, but it is good every now well may, dream or idea or fantasy, is for now to be taken quite and then to imagine to myself such a possibility, even if the possibil- seriously, at least if it ceaselessly engages itself to configuration by ity of it still seems vague today. the appropriate pictorial means. Nothing should be done headlong. It has to grow, has to

For these curiosities will then become realities, realities of art, mature, and if some day the time is ripe for such a work, so much realities that make of life something more than, on average, it the better! appears to be. We still have to go looking for it.

Because they do not simply mirror what has been seen, adding We found parts, but not the whole thing. a dash more or less of temperament, but rather make visible those We do not yet have the energy that will carry us all the way. things that were seen in secret. For we are not sustained by a people.

"By the appropriate pictorial means," I said. For this is what We are looking for a people, however. We started looking decides whether images are to be born or something else is to over there at the state-supported Bauhaus. happen. It also decides what kinds of images will result. We started there with a community to which we have devoted Our agitated times have seen a great deal of chaos and confu- everything we possess. sion, at least if we are not still too close to it all not to be deceived More we cannot do. about it.

But our artists, even the most recent ones, appear to be striving Translated by David Farrell Krell John Sallis Klee's Philosophical Vision

BORDERING ON PHILOSOPHY

In the spring of 1901, at the age of twenty-one, Klee drew up a program in which he identified philoso-

phy and poetry as his ideal professions. At that time Klee was a student at the Bavaria Royal Academy of

Fine Art in Munich and, only a few months earlier, had begun attending the painting class given by Franz

Stuck. Not surprisingly, then, the program he drew up also included, as his real profession, the plastic arts

and, to cope with monetary exigencies, the drawing of illustrations. This program is indicative that, as in

general the ideal informs the real, so philosophy and poetry, in various guises, continually inform Klee's

artistic work. Yet neither philosophy nor poetry is allowed to subvert the genuine task. A few months after

he had drawn up the program, as he was preparing for his trip to Italy with his friend Hermann Haller, Klee

wrote in his diary: "Philosophical striving. Optimistic way. The only misgiving was [that I might neglect] the

genuine task by delving too deeply into philosophy and poetry." 1

Nonetheless, more than two decades later, in his lecture "On Modern Art," presented on the occasion

of an exhibition of his work at the Kunstverein in Jena, Klee declares that the artist "is perhaps, without really

2 wanting to be, a philosopher." This declaration comes in the wake of Klee's explanation of how it happens

that the artist often produces seemingly arbitrary deformations of the natural forms of appearances. His

point is that the artist—and here he is defending modern art—does not feel bound to these appearances,

these "end-forms," for he does not regard them as the essence of the natural process of creation. Rather, the

artist It is places more importance on the formative forces (an den formenden Kraften ) than on the end-forms.

thus, by virtue of the shift from the end-forms (the natural appearances) to the formative forces behind them,

that the artist is perhaps a philosopher.

This decisive shift regarding what the artwork would present has its correlate on the side of the work

itself, namely, in a shift from form to forming or form-giving Formung ). In a Bauhaus course in 1924, Klee (

explains this shift to his students:

Forming determines form and thus is superior to it. Form is never to be considered as

something settled, as a result, as an end, but rather as genesis, as becoming, as essence.

Form as appearance is an evil, dangerous specter. What is good is form as movement,

as action, as active form. What is bad is form as immobility, as an end, as something suf-

fered through and achieved. What is good is forming. What is bad is form. Form is the

3 end, is death. Forming is movement, is action. Forming is life.

1 Paul Klee, Tagebucher von Paul Klee, 1898- 1918, ed. Felix Klee (Cologne: M. DuMont Schauberg, 1957), #137, #175. With

the exception of David Farrell Krell's translation of "On Modern Art" (included in this volume), all translations of texts by Klee are my own. 2 Klee, "On Modern Art," 13. 3 Paul Klee, Form- und Gestaltungslehre 2: Unendliche Naturgeschichte, ed. Jurg Spiller (Basel: Schwabe, 1970), 269.

15 Since art is to present, to make visible, the formative forces, which, from behind appearances drive the movement, the genesis, by which form is imparted to appearances, it is imperative that the artwork embody, not merely the form that appearances assume, but the forming by which the form is installed. This imperative,

4 Klee adds, constitutes "the elemental theory of creativity ."

Thus it is incumbent upon the artist to press on beyond appearances to the genesis and forces underlying them. These invisible,

" 5 underlying elements constitute "the real truth that the artist strives to reach and to present. It is a striving that in this respect has an affinity to philosophical striving. This affinity is made especially evident in a statement that occurs repeatedly, with only slight variation, in the Bauhaus courses. Klee speaks of steps "in the direction of the essential. ..as opposed to the impressional."

He continues: "One learns to look behind the facade, to get to the root of things. One learns to recognize what flows beneath, learns the prehistory of the visible. One learns to dig deep, to lay bare. One learns to lay the ground [begrunc/en], learns to

." 6 analyze In the idiom of Klee's Jena lecture, the imperative is that the artist bring a penetrating look to bear on the things that nature sets fully formed before his eyes, that he look ever more deeply into the underlying genesis until his gaze rests in "proximity to that secret ground by which the primordial law nourishes every development." Extending his vision beyond the here and now, the artist would come to dwell "in the womb of nature, in the primal ground of Creation, which holds the secret key to every-

." 7 thing that is

As the philosopher moves from present appearances to

their underlying ground, so the artist too would transcend the i • 4. Jin " Xt&~~ ,V* rVVJ-flirc-iWmMJv forms present here and now in the direction of their ground. This philosophical striving on the part of the artist is expressed in the Fig. 1: Paul Klee (1879-1940), l-You-Earth-World Ich-Du-Erde-Welt c. famous contrast that Klee draws between himself and his friend ( ), 1924, from "Ways of Studying Nature," in Boris Friedewald, Paul Klee: Franz Marc, who possessed a noble sensuousness and warmth Life and Work (Munich: Prestel, 2011), 124. as well as the strongest of bonds to the earth:

." 9 My fire is more like that of the dead or of the close enough

unborn.... I place myself at a remote, origi- Yet what is the structure and character of artistic transcen-

nary point of creation, where I assume formu- dence, of the move, effected through the artwork, from present

las for men, animals, plants, stone and earth, appearances to their ground? Klee describes it, first of all, as

fire, water, and air and, at the same time, for based on "the knowledge that the thing is more than its outside

." 10 all circling forces.... My earthly eye is too far- reveals Thus, the move proceeds, in the first instance, from the

sighted and sees mostly through and beyond optical exterior to the objective interior. Klee explains that such

8 the most beautiful things . a move can be carried out by dissecting the thing and visualiz-

ing its inside by way of plane sections; clearly this is the method

Klee as artist is similarly placed by the words that were to be of cubism in the broad sense applicable to many of Klee's own engraved on his gravestone: "I cannot be grasped in the here works.

and now [d/esse/f/g], for I dwell just as well with the dead as with Yet, in addition to the penetrating intuition that culminates in the unborn, somewhat closer to creation than usual, but far from making visible the interior of the object, there are other ways,

non-optical ways, that serve to conjoin beholder and object, that

are indeed essential in constituting the appearance of the object, 4 Ibid. its manifestness in and to our experience. There is, first, the "way 5 Klee, Tagebiicher, #1081.

6 Paul Klee, Form- und Gestaltungslehre 1: Das bildnerische Denken, 3rd. ed.,

ed. Jurg Spiller (Basel: Schwabe, 1 971 ), 69. See also Unendliche Naturge-

schichte, 35. 9 Ibid., 427

7 Klee, "On Modern Art," 14. 10 Paul Klee, "Wege des Naturstudiums," in Paul Klee: Kunst-Lehre, ed. Gun- 8 Klee, Tagebiicher, #1008. ther Regel (Leipzig: Reclam, 1987), 68. ) ) ) )

12 'To stand despite all possibility of falling.'" One of Klee's most

exquisite presentations of this way and this problem is found in

the work Tightrope Walker ( Seiltanzer (1923; plate 20). The upper way evokes our longing to free ourselves from earthly

bondage, to gain free mobility, to soar, to fly. Flying is a frequent

theme in Klee's artistic work, for instance, in his numerous draw-

ings of birds, such as More Bird ( mehr Vogel (1939; fig. 2) and

Superior Bird ( hoherer Vogel (1940; plate 16). In the works

Uneven Flight (unebene Flucht plate and Collection ) (1939; 14)

of Doves ( Tauben Sammlung (1939; plate 10) both the upward

way (as longed for, never simply traversed) and the dissection

or deformation of the object are presented. The longing for the

upward way is both presented in and named in the title of the ink

drawing Hardly Still Walking Not Yet Flying geht kaum mehr , ( ,

In fliegt noch nicht ) (1927; plate 15). the etching Heightl (Hohel)

(1928; fig. 3), there is displayed the exhilaration of being on the Fig. 2: Paul Klee, More Bird ( mehr Vogel), 1939/939. Pencil on paper, 21 x 29.5 cm, Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern. upward way. Klee stresses the union of these two metaphysical ways as

well as their connection to internalizing vision, though as these

examples show, one or another of these moments may predomi-

nate in a particular work. Nonetheless, they cohere in a synthesis

of visions, and it is from this synthesis that the form of a work

arises. The figures thus produced "totally deviate from the optical

image of the object" and hence look like distortions of its natural

appearance. And yet, Klee continues, "from the standpoint of

13 totality" they "do not contradict it."

These formulations, including the account of the two meta-

physical ways as directed from earth and world, occur in the

text "Ways of Studying Nature," which first appeared in a

1923 Bauhaus publication. The similarity to the formulations in

Martin Heidegger's 1935-36 essay "The Origin of the Work

of Art" is striking. To be sure, there are fundamental differences:

most notably, for Heidegger world is neither identified with the

cosmos nor taken to be essentially related to it, whereas Klee

repeatedly stresses that our abode is not just on the earth but

also in the cosmos, that there is cosmic—and not just terrestrial-

14 community. Thus, it is highly unlikely, as Poggeler has shown,

that Heidegger was influenced in this regard by Klee, especially

Fig. 3: Paul Klee, Height! (Hohel), 1928/189. Etching on copper, 23 since Heidegger's engagement with Klee's work came more than x 22.8 cm, Private collection, as permanent loan in the Von der Heydt- two decades after he wrote "The Origin of the Work of Art." Museum, Wuppertal. Furthermore, after Heidegger saw the Klee collection in Basel in

the late 1 950s and was invited to write a preface to a publication

of common earthly rootedness," which "arises from below"; and, about the collection, he declined because, as he wrote, "there is

second, there is the "way of cosmic community [Geme/nscfiaft], especially the following difficulty: that it is still not clear to what

11 which descends from above." Klee calls these "metaphysical extent Klee's self-interpretation ('cosmic' etc.) properly represents

15 ways"; and in the diagram that accompanies this account, he all that occurs in his creative work." Hence, there are not only

shows the first way as arising from the earth and the second

as descending from the world (see fig. 1 ). To these two ways 12 Ibid., 69. static there correspond forms and dynamic forms, respectively. 13 Ibid., 70.

The lower way holds in force the gravitational pull toward the 14 Referring to the thesis, put forth by Siegbert Peetz, that Heidegger's artwork essay was directly influenced by the formulation in Klee's "Ways of Study- center of the earth; it is the locus of the problem of static equi- ing Nature," Poggeler shows how, beyond the most general aspect, the two

librium, which, says Klee, "may be characterized by the words: treatments of earth and world are fundamentally different, so much so as to preclude there having been any direct influence. See Otto Poggeler, Bild und Technik: Heidegger, Klee und die moderne Kunst (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2002), 121.

11 Ibid. 15 Ibid., 132. At about the same time that he drew up his program desig-

nating the ideal and real professions, Klee wrote: "Then I phi- 18 losophize about death, which makes up for what was not completed in life. The longing for death, not as destruction, but as

18 striving toward perfection." Later there are frequent reflections

on death, such as the following from 1932:

Death is nothing bad; this I came to terms with

long ago. Do we even know what is more

important: life now or what will come after?

Perhaps that other life is more important, but

that is something we know nothing about. I

will die happy if I have created a few more good works. 19

Yet virtually all that Klee wrote about death pales in compari-

son with the many works touching on death that he created in

the face of his own impending death, foremost among them the

1940 painting Death and Fire ( Tod und Feuer; fig. 4).

Klee writes also about the place of the human, about how

humans are situated, not only in the cosmos, not only in connec-

Fig. 4: Paul Klee, Death and Fire ( Tod und Feuer), 1940/332. Oil and tion with earth and world, but also in relation to animals and colored paste on burlap, 46.7 x 44.6 cm, Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern. gods. A diary entry from December 1903 reads:

fundamental differences between their respective conceptions of There are two mountains on which it is bright

world and earth but also serious reservations on Heidegger's and clear, the mountain of the animals and the

part as to whether Klee's theoretical formulations measure up mountain of the gods. But between them lies

to the originary character of his artistic work. Nonetheless, even the dim valley of men. If one of them happens

with these limitations, the affinity between their respective analy- to gaze upward, he is seized by a premoni-

ses suffices to demonstrate that, at the very least, Klee's theoreti- tory, insatiable longing, he who knows that he

cal writings border on philosophy. does not know, for those that do not know that

Indeed his writings, not only the theoretical essays but also the they do not know and for those who know that

Diaries and the notes from the Bauhaus courses, are replete with they know. 20

passages that touch upon fundamental philosophical themes.

Even before he began his art studies in Munich, Klee was preoc- Whether deliberately or not, the passage echoes the voice of

cupied with questions about time and about eros, as reflected in Socrates, both his declaration that his merely human wisdom con-

a remark from 1901 : "The future slumbers within man and needs sists in knowing that he does not know and his portrayal, in the

only to awaken. It cannot become. Hence, even a child knows Symposium, of the erotic human as ever in between ignorance

16 Eros." In his first theoretical essay, "Creative Credo," written and wisdom, mortality and immortality. It was in fact at about this

in 1918, he construes the relation between time and space in time that Klee records in his diary having just read the Symposium

a way that proves to be decisive for his artistic work and for (though perhaps not for the first time) and comments: "Plato's

21 his interpretation of the work. He writes that "space is a tempo- Symposium very beautiful." Klee also offers his own portrayal

ral concept." His explanation follows: "When a point becomes of this human being-in-between in the form of the drawing Idardly

movement and line, that requires time. Likewise when a line shifts Still Walking, Not Yet Flying (plate 15).

into surface. It is the same with the movement of surfaces into In the Bauhaus courses there are logical analyses of certain

17 space." Correspondingly, Klee emphasizes that works of visual concepts and even, in one instance, of the concept of concept,

art are not simply spatial but equally temporal, that they have a that is, of the essence of concept as such. According to Klee's

certain temporality that the acute beholder senses and follows in analysis, what pertains fundamentally to concepts is opposition:

moving between different areas of the work. In other words, there "A concept is not thinkable without its opposite.... A concept is 22 are paths through the work that are to be traversed in a certain not effective without its opposite." Klee cites as an example

temporal rhythm.

18 Klee, Tagebucher, #143.

19 Cited in Friedewald, Paul Klee, 169.

16 Cited in Boris Friedewald, Paul Klee: Life and Work (Munich: Prestel, 2011 ), 20 Klee, Tagebucher, #539.

17. 21 Ibid., #568.

17 Klee, "Schopferische Konfession," in Kunst-Lehre, 62. 22 Klee, Das bildnerische Denken, 15. ] .

the opposed concepts of chaos (disorder) and cosmos (order). tion of the work but rather of a vision that only emerges as the

Since opposition belongs intrinsically to concepts, there is— Klee work itself takes shape. Thus, artistic creation is not determined,

concludes—no such thing as a concept in itself {Begriff an sich). not governed, by a concept or image of what is to be created.

There are only pairs of concepts, and it is only as paired with its An artwork is not simply a translation: artistic production does

opposite that a concept can function meaningfully—as "above" not merely translate into material form an idea or an image envi-

requires below, lert requires right, behind requires in sioned independently and in advance of the creative activity that

front," and in general, thesis requires antithesis. Klee offers a brings the work forth. It is in this connection that Klee writes in

graphic supplement to the analysis, connecting the opposites by a 1918 diary entry: "In art vision is not so essential as making- 27 a line and noting that the line may be longer or shorter, depend- visible." Artistic creation is not guided by an antecedent vision;

ing on the extent of the opposition between the opposed con- the artist does not know in advance what is to be brought forth.

cepts. Along the line a concept and its opposite can move closer In Klee's own theoretical formulation: "Art plays an unknowing

to or farther from each other as the magnitude of the opposition play [unwissend Spiel with ultimate things, and yet it reaches 28 becomes less or greater; only the central point on the line is fixed them!" It is for this reason, because the truth that comes to be

in the sense that here the opposition is resolved and the concepts manifest in and through an artwork is not made manifest through

rendered dormant. Klee indicates, finally, that this graphic logic conceptual, theoretical activity, that art can offer an attestation

of the concept is to be directive for the artist: in artistic production that is independent of philosophy. What comes to be thought

dualities such as good and evil are to be treated, not as mere philosophically can also be disclosed in the medium of art in such

dyads, but as complementary opposites in their unity; that is, they a way that philosophy and art become supplementary, each in its

are to be handled artistically in such a way that they are held own distinctive way opening onto the same truth.

together in their very opposition. Through this analysis Klee thus

explicates what is required in order, as an early diary entry put it 23 (in the form of a hope), "to be able to reconcile the opposites." ARTISTIC ATTESTATION

Although highly theoretical analyses abound in Klee's essays Klee recognized that art and philosophy have, despite their

and lecture notes, he repeatedly insists on the limitation of theory basic difference, a certain affinity. In a diary entry from 1917, he

and of theoretical discourse with respect to artistic creation. In writes: "Philosophy has an inclination [Ne/gung] toward art; at 29 a Bauhaus course in 1922 he tells his students: "I warned you the beginning I was astonished at what all they saw." Indeed

against calculating, for theory after all only means arranging many of the most original philosophers from the 1920s on came

things that are present in feeling and plays only a secondary to see Klee's work as presenting in the guise of art certain of the

role in the creative process, namely the role of criticism, which most fundamental issues with which they, as philosophers, were 24 sets in afterwards." A similarly supplemental relation obtains engaged. The list includes a wide range of thinkers: Benjamin, when the artist engages in theoretical discourse about his art, as Adorno, Heidegger, Blanchot, Derrida, Foucault, Gadamer,

Klee indicates at the beginning of his Jena lecture by expressing Deleuze, Merleau-Ponty, and others. While each of these took

his concern as to whether he can speak of his work in the right up Klee's work in a distinctive way, perhaps the most remarkable way and by his insistence that his words are not to be taken in cases are those of Benjamin, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty.

isolation but as complementary to his art which "speak[s] for itself In 1921, on the occasion of visiting an exhibition of paintings 25 in its own language." In a diary entry from 1909, Klee gives by Klee's friend August Macke, who had been killed in the war

a more specific and decisive indication regarding the determi- in 1914, Benjamin wrote: "I am coming more and more to the

nation of creative activity. He writes: "Moreover, in order to be realization that I can depend sight unseen, as it were, only on the 30 successful, it is essential never to work toward an image already painting of Klee, Macke, and maybe Kandinsky." Around the

envisioned in advance. Rather, one must give oneself completely same time, Benjamin purchased a small painting by Klee entitled 26 to the developing portion of the area to be painted." Here Klee Angelus Novus (1920; fig. 5). The work came to figure promi-

makes it clear how decisively his sense of artistic creation differs nently in Benjamin's thought. His understanding of what he saw

from the ancient model of techne: in artistic creation it is not a attested in it was finally expressed in his 1940 essay "On the

matter of having the work in view—in the mind's eye, as we say— in Concept of History." His meditation on Klee's angel makes up the

advance so as then simply to materialize it in the actual artwork, entire ninth section of the essay: which would thus come to be made precisely in the image of

the paradigm envisaged in advance and directive throughout the There is a picture by Klee named Angelus No-

creative process. It is not a matter of a vision prior to the produc- vus. It shows an angel who looks as though

he is about to move away from something at

23 Klee, Tagebucher, #389.

24 Klee, Dos bildnerische Denken, 295. See also Tagebucher, #961, where 27 Ibid., #1134. Klee reports that he argued with Marc's wife—and so had to apologize 28 Klee, "Schopferische Konfession," 66.

to Marc—about the theory of art; Klee says that he "protested forcefully 29 Klee, Tagebucher, # 1 081

against the concept of theory in itself [Theor/e an sich]." 30 Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings: Volume 1, 1913-1926, ed. Marcus 25 Klee, "On Modern Art," 9. Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University 26 Klee, Tagebucher, #857. Press, 1996), 505. 20

Fig. 5: Paul Klee, Angelus Novus, 1920/32. Oil transfer and Fig. 6: Paul Klee, Heroic Roses ( heroische Rosen), 1938/139. Oil watercolor on paper on cardboard, 31 .8 x 24.2, The Israel Museum, on jute fabric, 68 x 52 cm, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Jerusalem, Gift of Fania and Gershom Scholem; John Herring, Marlene Dusseldorf. and Paul Herring; Jo Carole and Ronald Lauder, B87.994.

which he is staring. His eyes are open wide, his In the late 1950s, Ernst Beyeler, whom Heidegger often

mouth is open, and his wings are spread. The visited in Basel, acquired a large collection of works by Klee,

angel of history must look like this. He has his including a number of the most celebrated works. He set up a

face turned toward the past. Where a chain of temporary exhibition in an old house in a Basel suburb, and it

events appears before us, he sees one single was not long before Heidegger came for a visit to the exhibition.

catastrophe, which incessantly piles wreckage Heidegger was left alone with Klee's works for several hours and

upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. then, after a brief pause, returned with his friend Heinrich Petzet

He would like to stay, to waken the dead, and to continue viewing the works. Petzet reports that Heidegger

join together what has been shattered. But a was deeply affected by several of the works, especially some

storm is blowing from paradise, which has got of those from Klee's last years. He was impressed, for instance,

caught in his wings and which is so strong that by "the almost painful pathos of Heroic Roses [ heroische Rosen, 32 the angel can no longer close them. This storm 1938; fig. 6] losing their glow in the autumn frost." Heidegger

irresistibly drives him into the future, to which reportedly said in reference to this painting: "Klee is able to let

33 he turns his back, while the pile of wreckage attunements [Sf/mmungen] be seen in the picture." Heidegger

before him grows skyward. This storm is what also was especially attentive to a pen-drawing Hyperculture

31 we call progress. of Dynamo-radiolars 1 ( Uberkultur von Dynamoradiolaren 1)

(1926; fig. 7). Radiolars are small sea animals with star-shaped

In what Benjamin gleans from Klee's picture, in the discourse that skeletons; whereas dynamo refers to the production of electrical

the picture evoked nearly twenty years after he acquired it, Ben- energy. So, as the creatures are presented in the picture, they are

jamin's thought is perhaps also, as he once said both of Klee and like living windmills or wind turbines. In such a picture, accord-

of Kafka, essentially solitary. It is a thought issuing in a vision of ing to Heidegger, Klee ironizes the technical by bending it back

history, in a solitary philosophical vision that is reflected back to into the natural and representing the result as a hybrid growth.

itself in the visionary look of Klee's angel.

32 Heinrich Wiegand Petzet, Encounters and Dialogues with Martin Hei-

degger, 1919- 1976, trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Chicago: Uni-

31 Walter Benjamin, "Uber den Begriff de Geschichte," in llluminationen: Aus- versity of Chicago Press, 1993), 148.

gewahlte Schriften 1 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977), 255. 33 Poggeler, Bild und Technik, 132. Fig. 7: Paul Klee, Hyperculture of Dynamo-radiolars I [Uberkultur von

Dynamoradiolaren J ), 1926/133. Pen and ink on paper, 23 x 30.8 cm, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf.

In such works Heidegger saw displayed Klee's confrontation with technology. Not coincidentally, the work comes from Klee's years at the Bauhaus, where the question of the relation of art to technology was a primary concern. Petzet reports also that when

Heidegger stood before the work A Gate (e/n Tor; plate 45), painted in 1939, a year before Klee's death, he fell into a deep silence. Then, "after a while he said in a somber tone, 'This is the 34 gate through which we all must at some time pass: death.'"

Heidegger later visited the Klee exhibition in Basel again and Fig. 8: Paul Klee, Saint from a Window ( Heilige aus einem Fenster ), then subsequently paid a visit to the Klee Foundation in Bern. It 1940/56. Watercolor and chalk on paper, 29.2 x 20.8 cm, Zentrum was in Bern that he saw the two works from Klee's final year to Paul Klee, Bern. which he refers in the opening of his 1962 lecture "Time and

Being": writes that "The Origin of the Work of Art" thinks historically the

works that have been [die gewesenen Werke). He continues: the

If now we were to be shown in the original art to come no longer is tasked with the erecting of world and the

two pictures by Paul Klee that he created in setting forth of earth, as thematized in the artwork essay, but with

the year of his death, the watercolor Saint bringing about the relation from out of the event of conjuncture

from a Window [ Heilige aus einem Fenster; fig (das Erbringen des Verhaltnisses aus Ereignis der Fuge). More

8] and the oil painting on jute Death and Fire generally, he writes that Klee is the sign of the coming transforma-

[Tod und Feuer; fig. 4], then we would want to tion of art in relation to the transformation of being. In a letter to

linger for a long time before them and to give Petzet after his visits to the Klee exhibition, Heidegger wrote: "In 35 37 up all demands for immediate intelligibility. Klee something has happened that none of us grasps as yet."

It was during this period of preoccupation with Klee's work that

During his visits to Basel and Bern, Heidegger wrote extensive Heidegger reportedly spoke about writing a second part to "The notes about what he saw and about the ways in which Klee's art Origin of the Work of Art." Though Heidegger seems never to portended that the future of art—rather than remaining in the orbit have written such a text, the fact that he saw a need to do so is of the metaphysics of the past—might prove capable of attesting indicative of the effect that his encounter with Klee's work had on to the very transformation that Heidegger foresaw as imperative his understanding of art and of its future prospects. for thought. Though these notes have not yet been published, a In Merleau-Ponty's essay Eye and Mind, it is Klee who fig- 36 good deal is known about their contents. In one note Heidegger ures preeminently as the prototypical modern painter. Both Klee's

artistic work and his theoretical writings play an instrumental role

in Merleau-Ponty's venture in this essay to develop an ontological 34 Petzet, Encounters and Dialogues, 148.

35 Martin Heidegger, "Zeit und Sein," in Gesamta usgabe, vol. 14 (Frankfurt: conception of painting as such. Both in its original appearance Klostermann, 5. 2007), in Art de France in 1961 and in the book version published after 36 See Gunter Seubold, "Heideggers nachgelassene Klee-Notizen," Hei- degger Studies 9 (1993): 5-12 and Poggeler, "Klee im Blickfeld Hei-

deggers," in Bild und Technik, 117-58. 37 Petzet, Encounters and Dialogues, 150. Merleau-Ponty's death, the text included a number of images, as it retraces the very lines that such configurations have already

among them a color reproduction of Klee's Park near /.ufcerne] installed. These specters that haunt the scene of the visible "exist 42 Park bei Lu[zern]) (1938). only at the threshold of profane vision." It is the genius of the 22 ( Early in the essay Merleau-Ponty declares that "painting cel- painter not only to be able to see them as such but also, in a 38 ebrates no other enigma but that of visibility." In celebrating distinctively painterly way, to interrogate them concerning their

visibility, however, painting celebrates it precisely as enigmatic, capacity to render things visible, to expose just how it is that they

that is, as implicated in moments or aspects that ordinary vision grant to things a proper visibility. One result is a certain revers-

regards as invisible. In other words, painting celebrates visibility ibility of roles between the painter and the visible, so that, as

by giving "visible existence to what profane vision believes to be many painters have said—and Merleau-Ponty mentions specifi- 39 invisible." In short, painting "makes visible" (rend visible], as cally Klee— it is as though things look at the painter.

Merleau-Ponty says with obvious reference to Klee's celebrated Another pertinent passage in Eye and Mind concerns line.

statement that "art does not reproduce the visible but makes vis- Merleau-Ponty begins with what he calls the prosaic concep-

ible." tion of the line. According to this conception the line belongs

Yet how does Merleau-Ponty identify this invisible that paint- to things; it is a property or attribute of objects themselves, the

ing, in its celebration of enigmatic visibility, makes visible? In the outer contour of the apple, for instance, or the border between

Working Notes to his unfinished, posthumously published work the plowed field and the meadow. The task of the artist would

The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty calls it "the invisible be, then, simply to take over the line present in the world, to

of the visible" and explains that this "invisible is not the contradic- reproduce it on the surface of the work. And yet, it is precisely

tory of the visible," that "the visible itself has an invisible inner this conception of the line that painting puts in question, indeed

framework," that "the invisible is the secret counterpart of the suspends. Merleau-Ponty says: "This line is contested by all mod- 40 43 visible," that "it appears only within it." The text of The Visible ern painting, probably by all painting." Why is it contested?

and the Invisible is still more explicit: Because painters—above all, modern painters such as Klee and

Matisse—recognize "that there are no lines visible in themselves [il

It is therefore not a de facto invisible, like an n'y a pas de lignes visibles en so/], that neither the contour of the

object hidden behind another, and not an ab- apple nor the border between the field and the meadow is here

solute invisible, which would have nothing to or there, that they are always on the near or far side of the point 44 do with the visible; rather, it is the invisible of where one looks." In other words, one sees the line and yet

this world, that which inhabits this world, sus- does not see it. One sees the contour of the apple and yet sees

tains it, and renders it visible, its proper and in- nothing other than the apple contoured against the background.

terior possibility, the Being of this being [I'Etre One sees the border between the field and the meadow, and

41 de cet I'etant]. yet whatever one sees is either field or meadow, not the border

itself, not the border as something in itself. Lines are, in Merleau-

Thus, the invisible that painting renders visible is what already will Ponty's words "indicated, implicated, and even very imperatively 45 have rendered visible the visible itself; it is what will have made required by the things, but they are not themselves things." Seen

the visible visible, what will, even while remaining invisible, have yet not seen, there yet not there, present yet not present, the line is

constituted the very visibility of the visible. Extending Merleau- ambivalent. Even in its purely mathematical form, the line is enig-

Ponty's allusion to Heidegger, one could say that the invisible is matic: it can outline and thus determine a geometric shape, and

what grants to visible things their truth, their possibility of coming yet, since it has no breadth, since it has only the one dimension of

forth into unconcealment. length, it is, in the strictest sense, invisible. In outlining the things

Yet Merleau-Ponty's declaration near the outset of Eye and of the perceptual world, the line is similarly ambivalent; its char-

Mind that painting celebrates the enigma of visibility does not acter, its very mode of visibility, of presence, wavers indecisively

yet venture quite so far into the ontology of the visible. Rather, between opposites, and yet it is decisive, indeed imperative, for

it moves at a more properly phenomenological level where it the appearing of things. The line belongs to the visible spectacle,

is a matter of the virtually unseen that informs—and so renders is engaged in the very granting of its visibility, yet is not itself a

visible—the things seen in ordinary vision. Merleau-Ponty men- part of the spectacle.

tions light, lighting, shadows, reflections, color—that is, all those Clearly, then, contesting the line, as painting does, does not

moments that are open to vision without being visible things, all entail its exclusion. Rather, as Merleau-Ponty says, "it is a mat-

that haunts these things like ghosts. For the most part, we do not ter of freeing the line, of reviving its constituting power." It is at

see as such the configuration of lighting, of light and shadow, this point, in reference to this freeing of the line, that Merleau-

that not only enframes appearing things but also guides vision Ponty cites that most telling phrase from Klee. Here is the cita-

tion: "For henceforth, as Klee says, the line no longer imitates the

38 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, L'oeil ef Tesprit (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 26.

39 Ibid., 27. 42 Merleau-Ponty, L'oeil ef Tesprit, 29.

40 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le visible ef /' invisible (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 43 Ibid., 72.

269, 274. 44 Ibid., 73.

41 Ibid., 198. 45 Ibid. visible; it 'makes visible'; it is the diagram [Z'epure] of a genesis 46 of things." Thus, painting—especially modern painting—frees the line from the imitation function, from the mimetic operation based 23 on the prosaic conception of the line. At the same time, painting frees the line for the constituting operation to which it is suited.

The conclusion is evident, though in the essay Merleau-Ponty leaves it somewhat implicit: because the line displays the same ambivalent character as do all moments of the invisible, it is especially suited to render these moments visible on the surface of the work, be it a drawing or a painting and whatever materials are used in its composition. Because, no matter how it is inscribed, the line renders visible the invisible of the visible, it offers a diagram of the genesis of things; it renders visible on the surface of the work the way in which things come forth into their visibility, their unconcealment; it renders visible the moments by which the total visibility of visible things comes to be constituted.

A final passage in Eye and Mind takes up again the theme of visibility and gestures toward the analyses in The Visible and the Invisible, on which Merleau-Ponty was working at the time he wrote Eye and Mind. Now Merleau-Ponty formulates with remarkable precision the primary ontological theme: "What is

to [/e visible is to proper the visible propre du ] have a layer of an invisible in the strict sense, which it renders present as a certain 47 absence." It is this occult, secluded layer of invisibility that painting renders visible, that— in the words of Klee that Merleau-Ponty pieces together—painting annexes to the visible. It is because of painting's engagement with this invisibility, which, while of the visible, also lies outside the realm of visible things, that Merleau-

Ponty is led finally to what he calls the ontological formula of painting. The formula consists of words, written by Klee in 1916, which were inscribed on his tomb. They bespeak painting's engagement beyond the here and now of visible things. Merleau-

Ponty cites them in French translation: "Je suis insaisissable dans

I'immanence." In Klee's German the formula reads: "Diesseitig bin ich qar nicht fassbar." In Enqlish: "I cannot be at all qrasped in the here and now.”

46 Ibid., 74.

47 Ibid., 85.

Alejandro Arturo Vallega Paul Klee's Vision of an Originary Cosmological Painting

Paul Klee often has been recognized as one of the painters closest to philosophy in the twentieth century.

This has been the case because of his extensive, systematic, and clear writings on painting; his knowledge

of philosophy; and for his ability as a musician, that is, his proximity to the rational and the mathematical

1 through his sense of music and harmony. However, I see a deeper reason for the association of the artist

and the philosopher in his work, namely, what I would call Klee's attentiveness to the cosmological, rather

than the purely formal or mimetic character of painting. Klee's uniqueness lies in his attentiveness to the origi-

nary or genetic experience in nature and art, and in offering a new way of understanding—of seeing—paint-

ings and works of art. If one follows Klee's understanding of painting and the work of art, one learns to see

the work as a dynamic originary event involving a time-space movement invisible to the eye that seeks only

images of objective nature. Moreover, as such an originary event, painting enacts and exposes us to the

energy and force behind the arising to presence of nature and life, behind the objective presence of things,

plants, animals, and human beings. Painting is for Klee the enactment of energy and force underneath all

existence. In order to engage Klee's vision I will mainly focus on his 1924 lecture "On Modern Art," which

he gave in Jena on the occasion of an exhibition of his works, and at the same time articulates much of the

experiences he had while teaching at the Bauhaus. Following Klee's own strategy, I will first focus on his

2 discussion of the artist and the formal issues involved in painting, rather than on the content. This will pro-

vide the basis for turning to Klee's reinterpretation of the work of art as an originary event that exposes us to

the genesis or movement of nature and humanity. I will also discuss briefly some of his course lecture notes

3 from late 1923 and early 1924. Following Klee's own aim in his 1924 lecture, the following pages seek

to introduce a way of seeing, of looking at painting, that may allow for this dynamic originary movement in

the work to be experienced.

Nothing prepares one to write on the unprecedented, and for Paul Klee a work of art is always such

an experience. The difference that refers us to the unprecedented character of the work is repeated sev- 4 eral times by Klee himself in his famous lecture from 1924, "On Modern Art." As Klee points out in the

introduction of his lecture, engaging his painting through language one can at best hope for a supplement,

5 an approximation that will depend tout court on encountering the work itself. Indeed, painting is its own

1 Herbert Read, introduction to On Modern Art by Paul Klee, trans. Paul Findlay (London: Farber and Farber, 1 948), ii. Unless this

introduction is cited, the quotations from "On Modern Art" are from the translation contained in this volume.

2 Klee, "On Modern Art," 9.

3 Paul Klee, Notebooks, Volume 2: The Nature of Nature, ed. Jurg Spiller, trans. Heinz Norden (London: Lund Humphries, 1973).

4 Read, introduction to On Modern Art, ii.

5 Klee points out his discussion "meant merely to complement the impressions you yourselves will gain of my images" (Klee, "On

Modern Art," 9). 25 6 language . One finds here a definitive difference between paint- arise line, shade, and color, to populate the world in their distinct ing and language as a linguistic expression and logical tool, as way. In full view of the world, the works unfold and spread in time

13 well as between it and the thought that feeds on this sense of and space . language. For Klee, painting is another kind of expression, a dis- The seeming continuity between nature and the work of art tinct way of thought with its language. The sense of painting as breaks when Klee goes on immediately after to make clear that a language and way of thought is clearly indicated by the very just as roots and crown are not mirror images in a tree, the order title of the first volume of his notebooks: Das bildnerische Denken, of life and nature is not the same as the order of the work that

14 literally "thought in pictures" (translated in the title of the English appears . Unlike the traditional understanding of painting, for

7 version as "The Thinking Eye "). Klee's aim is mostly to shed some Klee the work does not accompany reality by mimetic repro- light "on the creative process," that is, about "the period in which duction. Art departs from nature, and this because that is what

15 a work receives its shape this process goes on more or less pre- the artist's art demands . The artist's line interrupts, erupts into

8 consciously [im UnterbewuBten]." Moreover, the difference in nature, to disturb it in its static appearance: indeed, art does

16 languages only points to a second distinction. For Klee, paintings appear as a deformation of natural forms . But this is a vital and works of art are not copies or reproductions of nature. The divergence that is the result of a difference between two expres-

17 work of art has its own life. Indeed, the work of art is an event, an sions of originary-related forces . Divergence may lead to a mis- originary, dynamic event, that must be engaged as a kind of orig- understanding concerning the artist's skill: an artist who does not inary energy (literally a being at work), prior to any reference to copy nature may be seen as incompetent or as one who falsifies

18 things, nature, names, and ideas based on the factual presence natural form . And yet, the artist remains like the trunk, true to a of things. Lastly, the work of art seems to "falsify" and "deform" vision of order in nature and life, and in answering to that experi- nature in its appearances as it exposes nature in its originary ence, in gathering and transmitting that order, he/she transmits

19 energy, in its movement, extensions, expansions, implosions and truth, and remains a channel of life . The artist is a channel of

1 explosions. ’ In following Klee's differentiations one finds oneself life-giving force. Again we find ourselves situated at the center of speaking in between distinct fields of experience: language, a tension between nature and art, but introduced now to a sense painting, nature, and life in terms of its originary energy. But it is of energy or force behind life that, although distinct from life and this last sense that distinguishes the work of art, namely, in that nature in their objective presence, is transmitted by the work and the work of art exposes the originary energy underneath, the the artist. undercurrent that gives rise to life. The work of art exposes us to a dynamic event much like the genesis of life—that is, if one learns how to engage the work of art in its originary being at work. As 2,

Klee himself would have it in his introduction to his lecture, we The simile is followed by a series of warnings concerning the may hope at best for an insight, an insight given by our learning very possibility of discussing the work of art in its distinct transmis- to see in an originary manner. sion of life and nature. The critical issue is that of the difference

between language and the work of art. Language operates as

a consecutive method of exposition, that is, when we speak we

2, present one aspect of what is being discussed at a time, one after 20 As FHerbert Read has pointed out, one of Klee's main con- another . Three-dimensional objects appear at the same time as cerns with modern art is the separation between artist and audi- lines, shades, color, mass, depth, and the various relationships

10 ence or layman . In order to begin to bridge the difference and between them. When one speaks of a painting one must speak explain the work of art and the work of the artist, Klee uses a of each dimension or element at a time, but when one looks at a

11 common simile, likening the artist to a tree . The roots are the work the dimensions operate upon the senses all at once. In other spreading of sensuous information that is received and ordered words, the expression of simultaneous dimensions that occurs in a by the artist, as he/she recognizes order in nature and life. From painting cannot happen in language. The difficulty grows when this spreading rootedness in life the artist receives a fecund flow one intends to consider the distinct dimensions of the work of art of impressions that through and in him/her constitute the sap that separately and then as they mix to configure a composition and

21 feeds the creative work. The artist withstands this flow and from style . As one puts emphasis on one dimension, the other seems it molds vision into work of art. Standing as a trunk the artist sees to disappear, yet only to reappear again at a later moment in a the works spread beyond him/her, much like the crown of a tree seemingly irrational or disordered way. In pointing out this ten-

12 with its branches and foliage . Out of the fingertips of the artist

13 Ibid.

6 Ibid. 14 Ibid.

7 Paul Klee, Form- und Gestaltungslehre 7: Das bildnerische Denken, 6th ed., 15 Ibid.

ed.Jurg Spiller (Basel: Schwabe, 2007). 16 "die deformatorische Notwendigkeit," ibid., 10; cf. ibid., 13.

8 Klee, "On Modern Art," 9. 17 Ibid., 10.

9 Ibid., 10, 13. 18 Ibid.

10 Read, introduction to On Modern Art, iii. 19 Ibid.

11 Klee, "On Modern Art," 10. 20 Ibid.

12 Ibid. 21 Ibid. )

27 sion between language and the work of art, Klee has introduced inner need calls for it." One may think here for example of a

a characteristic that distinguishes painting and other visual works colored line, or the use of grays instead of defined shades of

of art, namely the possibility of experiencing simultaneously vari- white and black. At the same time, this kind of vagueness remains

ous dimensions of life, history, and, as we will see later, time in its a matter of conscious execution. Each of these elements responds

cosmological sense. to a specific quantity, line is length, shade concerns degrees, and

In Printed Sheet with Pictures Bilderbogen] plate color the system of relationships one finds in the color wheel. ( (1937; 36),

one finds not a story, a moment, a subject, but rather a palimpsest These are the dimensions of painting's formal elements, before

of stories, which all at once strike us to give configuration to a one has come to the configuration of a subject or content.

picture, a single blow, or experience that reaches one at the level

of heart and mind. Keeping this simultaneity in mind, one finds

the figure of Suicide on the Bridge ( Selbstmorder auf der Brucke , ) 5

(1913; plate 21) standing upon the top of many elements that Klee now introduces a new dimension, the first moment of criti-

simultaneously constitute the distance between the bridge and cal decisiveness, the configuration of the subject, that is the aris- 28 the bottom of the picture, the distance between life and death. ing of something like the figure or the object. As Klee indicates,

Before moving on I must add that Klee's observations also the arising of the subject of a painting may be likened to the idea

repeat what he states from the outset: painting, drawing, and of motif and theme in musical thought, particularly in the sense 29 works of art have their own language. This language is not of playfulness between formal elements and form. At this point

linguistic, and the origin and sense of the work cannot be that the recognized dimensions are brought together to form content

objective reality that is fitting to word and concept as oriented beyond formal considerations. In spite of the extensive analysis

by rational-linguistic understanding alone. There is language, but of the formal elements, their mixture depends on the mood or 30 a language and sense as difficult and savage as that suggested disposition of the one creating Disposition des Schaffenden}. (

by the mysterious and unsettling experience of Concert on the In other words, unlike Leonardo, who gives extensive formulas for

Branch [Konzert auf dem Zweig (1921; plate 40). the mixing of elements, Klee does not have measurements for the

mixing of single elements or for their combination. In the move-

ment of the line beyond the artist's fingertips, out of the mixing of

4, elements, ideas and suggestions arise that may lead to a material

In order to arrive at the heart of Klee's discussion, the ques- interpretation, to the idea of a possible subject for the picture.

tion of the content of the work of art, we must follow his path While the layman only sees the idea he/she holds or the object,

through the discussion of formal issues that will introduce further the artist has a sense of the interplay of elemental dimensions. 22 dimensions of his work and thought. Klee makes his strategy Thus the artist is always seeing the formal; but once the object

clear from the outset. He begins from what is less familiar to the suggests itself, the formal becomes elemental in response and

layman, namely form, although his ultimate aim will be the rein- attentiveness to the object. When the idea or suggestion occurs in

terpretation of content in light of what may be learned about the the artist's vision, he/she is free to follow it, develop it, and to use 23 work of art by looking at its various simultaneous dimensions. the formal elements to give it distinct form. Here the requirement

31 The most basic dimension in painting concerns its three formal for the painter is twofold. Once the possible subject is identi- 24 elements: line, tone value or chiaroscuro, and color. These are fied, that is fittingly "interpreted and named," it has a life sepa- 32 analogous to and work in a way that may be expressed in terms rate from the will of the artist. But this separate life still remains

of nature, that is, in terms of measurement, weight (tonal contrast, inseparable from the elements and their originary movement. On

light to dark), and quality (of pigment, each color has a distinct the one hand, the title appears; not from nature or an idea, but 25 33 quality). In turn these elements have specific ways of relating to out of the play of elements, and out of a subconscious play.

each other. Color is a matter of quality (red, yellow), of weight/ With title or label the suggested subject becomes a referent for

tone (lighter or darker), and of extension and contraction. Shade the painter. At the same time the formal issues remain crucial to

or tone also concerns extension. Line only concerns extension. the execution of the idea or subject. Here, although not specified

From this analysis we see the possible interaction of the various by Klee, one may think of what painters like Robert Motherwell 26 elements and the variety of possible intermixture between them. often pointed out about a successful picture, that the subject or

The analysis gives inklings of the specificity and control Klee has content is always related to the formal elements, as well as to the

as he paints: he adds an observation that only complicates the

system. Vagueness in one's work, applying a color or line in a 27 Ibid. that not to the analytical of relation- manner does respond order 28 Ibid., 12.

ship between dimensions is only permissible "when a special 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid.

31 Ibid.

22 Ibid. 32 "bedeuted und genant," ibid., cf. "wenn sie sich unter einem sehr

23 Ibid. zutreffenden Namen vorstellen," ibid.

24 Ibid., 11. 33 Ibid., 11. The question of the subconscious should not be separated from

25 Ibid. the question of the disposition of the artist which informs the mixing and

26 Ibid. manipulation of formal elements (ibid., 14). 40 kind of surface and physicality of the materials. Unlike the lay- attempt to fly away from the earthly. Together, these periods man's one-sided idea about the work as representation, the artist point directly to the static quality and dynamics of the mechanism plays in between the idea and his/her response to elements and of creative art. In pointing to the dynamism of romanticism, Klee's materials, with their specific possibilities and character. Indeed, suggestion is to go further in the direction of the dynamic, follow- this is why every painter ends up creating a technique and ways ing these forces that attempt to fly away from the earthly, to the of using the basic elements unlike any other. To return to Klee's point of moving on to "the grand circulation" or the great cycle

41 observation about the activity of the artist, the artist must channel of life. the subject as well as the requirements of the material. This is, needless to say, evident throughout the corpus of Klee's works in his choice of ground, material, content, and title. I must empha- z size that Klee does not only paint on primed canvas but very In order to gain a general understanding of the way this "life-

often on such distinct grounds as paper, cardboard, lacquered force" occurs in the work of art, I will turn briefly to Klee's remarks 42 canvas, plaster-primed burlap, chalk- and glue-primed news- on nature and the line in his 1923-24 course at the Bauhaus.

paper, chalk-lined gauze, double-layered burlap, and burlap I should emphasize that this is not a course for painters or visual primed with chalk and glue and mounted on cardboard. Each artists, but for designers who are to learn about design, form, of these grounds is part of a language appropriate to the final and composition. These remarks are crucial for understanding subject of the work. the experience from which Klee writes his 1924 lecture, and for

A crucial distinction concerning the relation between nature thereby gaining insight into the understanding of the work of art and painting (the work of art) in Klee becomes clear for us now: as engaging life-force itself. the work of art does not so much put into question the existence For Klee, behind all life as change and development lies of objects or nature, but rather, concerns the distinct appearance movement. He begins his lecture with the most basic observation: 34 of objects or life at a given moment in their nature. In making "Movement in the terrestrial realm requires force. Analogously clear the formal elements of painting and the coming together of with stroke, line and our other pictorial elements like plane or the image in light of their play, we have found that the painter tone and color, etc." Bewegung im irdischen Bereich erford- ( 43 gives form to a distinct configuration at a particular time and in ert Energie. Linie und Flache und ihre gliedernden Energien.) terms of the nature of the content or subject of the work. The com- Indeed it will in light of his discussion of movement Bewegung be ( ) bination of elements, in their specific dimensions, leads to formal and energy Energie that he will thereafter introduce and explain ( ) combinations, which give rise to subjects such as stars, vases, the basic elements of composition in painting. In his lecture from animals, plants, or human beings. Although in his lecture up to October 23, 1923, line and plane are discussed in light of the 44 this point Klee emphasizes formal elements, we now come to the development of plants, their growth, or "progressive motion." central issue for him, the content of the work of art. He identifies this progression as a "primitive energy of form cre-

ation" (primare Energie der Formgestaltung). 45 Lines are sheer

energy. But, as he points out, this force energy leads not to mere

6 . lines; the ultimate result is life: violets, fruit, leaves, and trees. The

The dimensions just discussed lead us to the point where source of this movement he equates with the seed, which in his the figure or object of the work appears through the construc- analysis becomes "a point" that "is about to emerge from a state

35 46 tive combination of the various elements. At this point a further in which its mobility was concealed." This is a point that is about dimension appears, "one that has everything to do with the ques- to become linear, which he calls an "irritated point" (Der gereizte 36 47 tion of content." We are speaking of the expressive character Punkt). One finds this point of irritation at each place in the 37 of each of the formal elements alone and in their combination. trunk where new branches begin to spring, at each point on the

A jagged line, a sinking horizontal line, a vertical line, a high branch where new leaves or flowers begin to appear. contrast of tones, a play of grays upon yellow, the intensity of a To return to the simile of the tree, it is as if line arose from the pure red or blue, a fading patch of green on red, the crashing of fingertips of the artist only to rise into the world, setting its path colors diametrically opposed; these are in each case expressions from out of its force for growth and development. One sees this 38 of feeling, which make possible meaning in a work. From such progress of the line in Little Tree ( Baumchen plate that ) (1935; 9) an expressive dimension and its repetition appear styles (another beautifully evokes Klee's simile. The development is also clear in dimension of the work). 39 Klee emphasizes the contrast between the classical or static style and the extreme "crass and bathetic" 40 Ibid. its in its style of romanticism with dynamic play and mixtures, 41 Ibid.

42 Refer to Klee's The Nature of Nature in its entirety for these notes.

43 In terms of Klee's thought, one may also speak analogously of energy as

34 Ibid., 13. force, since energy is understood as the driving urge underneath the arising

35 Ibid. and growth of life (Klee, The Nature of Nature, 3).

36 Ibid., 12. 44 Ibid., 11.

37 Ibid. 45 Ibid., 25.

38 Ibid., 11. 46 Ibid., 29.

39 Ibid., 13. 47 Ibid., 255. ) ] ]

Last Word in the Drama ( letztes Wort im Drama) (1938; plate force. Analogously with stroke, line and our other pictorial ele- 53 It ( 44) and Stick Out! durchhalten !) (1940; plate 43). In both ments like plane or tone and color, etc." cases the line gives rise to the subject. Line for Klee has the inten- 29 tion, the direction, and energy of nature.

The seed first moves earthward in a line, and then heaven- &

ward, in the opposite direction, still in a line. Thus, Klee concludes Returning from a Christmas break on January 9, 1924, Klee

that the spirit of the form creation that occurs in the development sums up the course that begins with the discussion we have just 48 of the seed, pictorially speaking, is "linear." The lines will con- mentioned:

tinue to develop as the plant grows, seeks nutrients, and encoun-

ters resistance. This double movement constitutes a typical tension We wound up with the irritated point [der ge-

of opposites that operates throughout Klee's understanding of reizte Punkt in nature. ..the seed itself. With

the various elements of painting, and may be clearly seen in the this seeming start, we reached the limit of our

trees and vegetation in Wall Plant ( Mauerpflanze plate action. The irritated point, our stylus poised to ) (1922;

2) where the central image is rooted in a movement of the line embark on a line— here is a minimal action. toward the ground, while the other figures move upward. Klee

finds the movement of the growth of a snail's shell exemplary. But emotionally and intellectually. ..the term

The shell shows a movement that arises from a tension between "irritated" already sets the scene for an active

internal sheltering and external progression (the shell protects start.... The instinctive realization that we can

the internal element and growth at the same time). Indeed, the continue beyond the start finds confirmation 49 arrows in Klee's work indicate precisely the movement of line. in the concept of infinity, which reaches from

One sees this as well in the movement of expansion and self-shel- the beginning to the end, and is not limited tering or contraction in Geometric Spiral geometrische Spirale to the beginning alone, and which leads to ( )

(1927; plate 27). Moreover, as is the case in Accusation in the the concept of circulation. In a circulatory pro-

Street ( Anklage auf der Strasse plate Manhunt cess movement is of the very essence, and the ) (1933; 47), 54 ( Menschenjagd (1933; plate 49), and Barbarian Mercenary question of the start thus becomes irrelevant.

Barbaren-Soldner plate the line sustains the move- ( ) (1933; 51)

ment that leads to the center of the action, the point of energy or Having highlighted movement, freed from a chronologi-

irritation. cal ordering, and objective presence, as the condition for both

Through repetition the line will become mass, and the linear nature and the point and the setting out of the artist, Klee goes on

forces, as they radiate upward, become a stream of life-force (as to point out the conclusion to which his analysis has led thus far. 50 in Little Tree [plate 9] for example). Clearly the lesson's aim is to

show that each line has a definite purpose in the whole, and that Allowing a primitive and concise output to un-

at the same time, each line has a life of its own. (This difference fold in this fashion, we took the opportunity to

in the function or character of line is clear in the different function have a closer look at two things: on the one

of the black lines around the round figures and as they appear hand the phenomenon of form-giving, in its

alone in Aliup [ aliup [1931; plate 7].) But the way he devel- context with the basic urge, in the sense of a

ops this traditional idea is by beginning from a point that has a way of life developing from a mysterious moti-

5] concealed movement, an "irritated point" (der gereizte Punkt). vation towards purposive action.

Moreover, this movement is not conceived in terms of the creation

of an already projected idea or object of representation (a tree, This phenomenon of form was discernible

a person) but it arises from a distinct point, which will become even in our initial practical work, when form

a whole and its parts (in Little Tree one moves from the single (structure) began to take care of itself on the

line at the bottom, to the tree and then its further branches—the smallest scale.... 52 living form). The lesson begins from nature, and in light of the

force of life in nature it introduces basic elements and issues of The way to form, to be dictated by some inner

composition, namely, the characteristics of the point, the origin of or outer necessity is more important than the

movement (irritated point), the progressive motion of the line as goal itself....

a natural phenomenon, and the way each line must attend to the whole. Ultimately the force of life will be expressed by each of The approach is what counts, determining the

the pictorial elements: "Movement in the terrestrial realm requires character of the work.... Form is given by the

process of giving form, which is more impor-

48 Ibid., 29. tant than form itself.. .what is good is form as

49 Ibid., 289-91.

50 Ibid., 34-35.

51 Ibid., 29, 34-35. 53 Ibid., 3.

52 Ibid., 39. 54 Ibid., 255. )

movement, as action, as active form.... What The engagement of movement, energy, and the originary

is good is form-giving [Formung]. What is bad points of tension in Klee's work are readily apparent in his works.

is form. Form is the end, death. Form-giving is In Violence ( Gewalt (1933; plate 46), it is clear that line directs

movement, action. Form-giving is life. the eye to the point of energy, and it is also used to create the

density at the point of contact. In Barbarian Mercenary (plate

These sentences constitute the gist of the theo- 51 ) the movement of the line leads to the heart of the matter, the

ry of creativity. We have now got to the heart point of impact. Line in its movement and creation of dynamic

it. Its is I is 1 of significance absolutely basic; and movement clearly at work in Flight (Fluchtj ( 940; plate 25). In

do not think I can repeat the sentences above this case, lines move in various directions away from the center 55 often enough. while a horizontal movement is sustained. In the comical Hardly

Still Walking, Not Yet Flying geht kaum mehr, fliegt noch nichtj (

These words and the course up to this point will serve as an (1927; plate 15), the vertigo from the figure's movement comes introduction to the rest of the course, that is, to the study of the from the way the lines around the figure continue to displace 56 basic elements of painting: line, tone, and color. It will be on the the center of gravity, as the lines that form the figure's contour basis of this theory of creativity as originary movement that Klee continue to move the eye in the direction the figure is walking. will introduce even the most basic pictorial elements. The function of line will change throughout Klee's career, as the

As Klee indicates, the central issue behind composition, even examples just mentioned indicate. By the later period, line takes at the most elemental level, is form-giving (Formung), that is, anal- flight as a free element. Such freedom of line is visible in Printed ogously, the life-giving movement, the movement of life. More Sheet with Pictures (plate 36). specifically one must remain with the movement, with the unfolding of line, tone, color, and their relationships. Only in remaining with the event of the work in such dynamic sense does form occur & out of the form-giving in which the creative urge of the artist and To return to the 1924 lecture "On Modern Art," the formal the energy of nature find analogous expression. This form-giving, elements and dimensions we discussed are ultimately a complex then, refers to movement, understood as the progression and ten- simultaneous event, which, rather than being a mere construc- 60 sion in which life arises to its objective configurations. Lines grow tion, form a "composition." We are speaking of a composition as does life. But this is not only an observation about line move- because of the dynamic character of the work in its simultaneous ment: tones and colors expand and contract, vibrate, leap. It is dimensions. But at this point in the lecture Klee still has another this movement, this life-giving energy, that remains the guiding dimension in mind. At issue now is the object or content of the 57 thread for the artist. At the same time, Klee also makes clear work, particularly in its very occurrence as distinct from nature. that composition only occurs as a balance between the image We have come full circle, and now, having learned the dynamic as essence (in the play of its elements) and appearance (the character of the work, return to the question of the content of objective or material aspect). "The end is but part of the essence the work, but this time to see the work in light of its originary

(its appearance). The true essential figure is a synthesis of form- and dynamic character. In other words, Klee will now explain the 58 giving and appearance." meaning of painting and the work of art that at first seemed to be

But the picture is always situated by the life-giving movement a "deformation" of nature. He will reinterpret the work of art in that directs and gives sense to the painting. In other words, look- terms of the channeling of life-giving energy in the work as such, ing at a painting or work of art in light of Klee's understanding, in the form-giving Formung that is the event of the work. ( ) one would seek the movement of the elements in the painting as As Klee explains, the artist's work seems a "deformation" well as the movement or life-force that becomes apparent in the of nature, first of all, because the artist "does not see in these subject. In looking at a work of art one is looking for that living culminating forms the essence of the creative process of nature. movement, that energy, and not for a reproduction or an imitation More important to him than the culminating forms are the forma-

61 of life. Indeed, as Klee himself points out on the basis of his own tive forces." As we heard above, the issue of the work of art is experience in the 1924 lecture, "On Modern Art," imitating life the form-giving and not the natural objective form or product. It is as it appears would only confuse the movement in which painter at this point, in pointing to this turning from the objects of nature 59 and nature touch through their creative movement. In this sense, to the form-giving, that Klee will equate the artist's activity with one may say that Klee's painting is ultimately about the articula- that of the philosopher: "He is perhaps, without really wanting 62 tion of the energy of life in its movement. to be, a philosopher." What brings together philosopher and

artist is a gazing beyond the immediate into the very originary

event of life and nature. It is creation itself, the genesis, and not 55 Ibid., 263, 269. the finished product that will occupy the artist. But here the artist 56 Ibid., 237.

57 Ibid., 144.

58 "Das Ende is nur ein Teil des Wesens (die Erscheinung). Wahre wesentliche

Gestalt ist eine Synthese von Gestaltung und Erscheinung" (ibid., 117). 60 Ibid., 13.

59 Klee speaks of ending up with a "befuddling confusion of lines" (Klee, "On 61 Ibid.

Modern Art," 14). 62 Ibid. and the philosopher also part. The view of genesis in the artist

is not rational but rather unintentional; it is not an explanation 1L

of existence that the artist accomplishes, but rather the subcon- If the point marks the entrance into the cyclical time-space

scious engagement with the life-giving movement of existence. movement of creation, the elements of painting serve to articu-

This engagement occurs through the form-giving in and as which late the life-giving force of nature because of their own dynamic

the artwork occurs: nature's life-giving force is channeled by the character or nature as form-giving Formung ). Line progresses, (

artist's activity or movement in form-giving. This is precisely what as we saw, and it may figure growth. This extends to planes,

Klee means when he says that "Nature is creative and so are for example as one draws a square and then another one-third 63 we." In order to begin to understand this sense of creation or larger than the first and so on. This kind of growth is not only

genesis in the work, one cannot consider nature in its objective two-dimensional but also three-dimensional, once the square

presence or ideas drawn from nature as the basis for art. The becomes a cube (one may think of Euclid's Elements). A simple

creative in nature is movement, and more specifically temporality example would be a cube that grows on all sides. In turn this

in its very occurrence; the way life and nature occur as temporal kind of progression occurs typically with tonality, in the move- 67 events. But here temporality concerns cosmological time, and not ment between white and black that constitutes foreshadowing.

the time of objectively present natural phenomena or historical Traditionally foreshadowing is understood as a fooling of the eye

fact. that allows for the impression of three-dimensional space on a

two-dimensional surface. But here it is not a matter of fooling the

eye: a movement does occur and is perceived, the movement of m tones forward and backward that allows for foreshadowing to As Klee points out in his 1924 lecture, "The more deeply [the occur. Furthermore, color also functions as movement, contract-

artist], ..gazes, the easier it is for him to connect today's points of ing and expanding, coming forward or moving backward. In

view with those of yesteryear. What imprints itself on him, rather terms of composition, we have now moved outside the theory

than the finished natural image, is the image of Creation as of perspective, and should think instead of the way certain lines, 64 Genesis, for him the sole essential image." Given this engage- colors, and subjects overlap in the suspended space of Klee's

ment with temporality, the world appears "all-too-limited in con- paintings and drawings.

trast to the of that ( Seite world which he has caught a glimpse runs The postcard The Sublime Side Die erhabenen ) (1923; 65 deeper, the world he has felt in a more animated way." In order plate 65) shows the growth upward of squares, rectangles, and

to further understand this sense of vision we may refer Klee's circles together as they grow, expand, and become lighter in

observations in his 1 924 lectures for a moment to the quote from their expansion upward. N. H. D (Province En-Aitch-Dee) (N.

his course in early 1924 concerning the point of irritation and the H. D. [provinz enhade]) (1932; plate 64) is a fine example of

urge of the artist that we cited in section eight. the growth and progression of line, tone, and color into a whole

As we found in the previous section, the point is not a fixed or picture. In Polyphonic Architecture polyphone Architektur ( )

mark. A point is a concealed occurrence of a movement. This is (1930; plate 62) one also sees such development, but in a "poly-

because the point marks past and future; in occurring in this way, phonic" way; as a simultaneous seeing of various dimensions. In

the point marks a cyclical movement. Thus the point, when consid- this picture squares expand to become cubes. At the same time,

ered in its movement, may serve as the instigation or experience the tonal play between black and white sets up a three-dimen-

that situates the observer and the artist's feeling and conscious- sional movement that gives the picture a movement from back to

ness in a cosmological time-space cycle: a continuous time of front and vice versa. The colors are also carefully related so that

creation without end or beginning. It is this cosmological space- red and green hold their tension in a way that sets up the atmo-

time that the artist engages, and that the work articulates: "There sphere and sustains the space for the play of tones and the pro-

where the central organ of all temporal-spatial animatedness, liferation of lines that figure buildings moving upward. In terms

whether we call it the brain or the heart of Creation, occasions of composition, neither the simultaneous movement of elements,

all the functions: who as an artist would not want to dwell there? nor their coming forward or receding depends on the rules of

In the womb of nature, in the primal ground of Creation, which perspective. In terms of the difference between organic dynamic 66 holds the secret key to everything that is?" These last words may composition in Klee and perspective, one sees in Agricultural

certainly sound like hyperbole if one does not consider them in Experimental Layout for Late Fall ( Agricultur Versuchs anlage fur

light of the concrete sense of movement that Klee finds in the ele- den Spatherbst plate the unfolding of geometric lines ) (1922; 6)

ments of painting. that could be understood in terms of perspective amid a broader

unfolding of spaces and tonalities in movement.

63 "Die Natur ist schopferisch und wir sind es" (Klee, The Nature of Nature, 259).

64 Klee, "On Modern Art," 13.

65 Ibid., 14.

66 "Da, wo das Zentralorgan aller zeitlich-raumlichen Bewegtheit, heiBe es 67 For the treatment of the pictorial means (line, tone, and color), see Klee, The nun Hirn oder Hery der Schopfung, alle Funktionen veranlaBt, wer mochte Nature of Nature, 299-307. On color, see "Die Ordnung und das Wesen da als Kunstler nicht wohnen? Im SchoBe der Natur, im Urgrund der der reinen Farben.... Die endliche und unendliche Bewegung der Farben

). Schopfung, wo der geheime Schlussel yu allem verwahrt liegt?" (Ibid.) auf der Flache" (Klee, Das bildnerische Denken, 466-51 1 tially-temporally fixed form. At this point, the work of art, painting

12* in this case, may be understood as the making visible of a move-

In considering these series of movements in Polyphonic ment that cannot be perceived in nature but that is exposed as

Architecture (plate 62) characteristic to the basic elements of the invisible originary temporalizing force, the life-giving move- painting, one is led to a further observation and to the cosmo- ment behind all that is. Although the work as an object may be logical sense of Klee's work. In his work one of Klee's aims is seen as a two-dimensional surface, the picture, given the char- to produce a "polyphonic painting." He develops this idea by acteristics of its basic elements, as well as this polyphonic pos- 68 taking further Delaunay's idea of simultaneous painting. For sibility, works in an entirely different and radical manner from

Delaunay the vital movement of the world and its movement is the traditional way of understanding painting as mere mimesis. simultaneity. For Klee, just as in music one may hear different In entering the world of the picture one enters a time-space of themes and harmonies at once, in painting themes also may creation, through the form-giving of the artist and the work one 69 appear simultaneously. But, as Klee himself states in his diary, is exposed to the life-giving movement of nature. Here appears painting may go further than music, in that it makes present spa- in full the cosmological sense of Klee's painting. We saw earlier 70 tially various moments of time at once. As we saw above, line, that the point introduces us into the cosmological time-space of tone, and color exercise specific movements. These movements creation, and that the progress of line, and the movement of tone, are themselves simultaneous in a composition. One may go now contrasts, and color occur as dynamics of the originary move- beyond these movements to recognize that the dimension of time- ment of that time-space continuum. Each composition is a play of space opened by the picture holds a further and more radical diverse simultaneous dimensions. Now, we find that the picture possibility. At the most basic level one can see that in a picture holds a further possibility, namely the making visible of the force various sizes of the same figure will suggest progression and of time by the overlapping of compositions. growth in space and time; that is, growth may be explicitly shown Polyphonic Architecture (plate 62) shows us a series of visual

71 in various stages at once in a picture. But if this is the case, one moments at once. In Wall Plant (plate 2) one finds other progres- may see in a picture temporality at work. If various views may be sions. But in the case of the first Polyphonic Architecture), depth, ( shown at once through superposition, this may be taken further found in the receding and coming forth of various veils of vision, to show the movement and life-giving force at work in various becomes a progression of moments, some before and some after stages of development at once (precisely what the chronology of the situation of the architectural construction. It is as if one could linguistic grammar would not allow). This occurs as temporality see the moment before the buildings were there and the moment may be engaged and shown in various moments simultaneously. after their construction. The crossing of color that occurs in The

Painting in its form-giving Formung may happen as an articulate Scales of Twilight ( Die Waage der Dammerung) plate ( ) (1921; exposure of the temporalizing movement or life-force of nature. 5) is analogous to this veiling of simultaneous temporalities or

In other words, more than one dimension of temporal develop- dimensions of vision. Klee makes this overlapping an even more ment may be gathered in one picture, and each and all may be explicit technique in such works as Aliup (plate 7) in which vari- experienced at once as a single picture/experience. ous layers of color systems or moments are superposed through

Here the picture begins to engage temporality not as a static a pointillistic technique. In Aliup one sees a yellow system, a moment, not in terms of making a copy of the appearance of blue-red system, and a series of linear fragments that occupy yet an object, or a superposition of objects, but in terms of a pro- another level. gression, as a dynamic event that goes back to a beginning and One important corollary to polyphonic painting is Klee's toward a future. We have moved from looking at painting as development of a theory of color that does not follow the tra- a two-dimensional representation of three-dimensional objects to ditional idea of color oppositions in a two-dimensional surface. the insight that paintings may expose one to the originary tempo- Klee taught color as a system of oppositions and relations that

72 ralizing movement in which things take a determinate and spa- occurred as a spherical relationship. From what we have seen,

this makes sense, because the color relationships are occur-

ring in the picture with a series of movements that happen in a 68 Michael Baumgartner and Marianne Amiet-Keller, Paul Klee: Melodie und

Rhythmus, exh. cat. (Bern: Hatje Cantz, 2006), 71. three-dimensional space, and moreover, through a movement

69 For a detailed treatment of music and painting in Klee's work see Paul in time-space that requires that color be understood in terms of Klee: Melodie und Rhythmus. Concerning the specific development of the extending-contracting-advancing-receding movements. One gets idea of polyphonic painting in Klee's work, see in the same volume: "Vom

'Structuralrhythmus' zum 'polyphonen' Bildgefuge: Eine Einfuhrung in Paul a sense of the need and working of such theory in pictures like Klees Beschaftigung mit Malerei und Musik am Bauhaus," 71 -85. Geometric Spiral (plate 27) in which colors expand forward 70 Already in 1917 Klee writes: "Simple motion strikes us as banal. The time contract in relationship that the three- element must be eliminated. Yesterday and tomorrow as simultaneous. In and inward a concerns

music, polyphony helped to some extent to satisfy this need.... Polyphonic dimensional sense of relations that happen in such movement.

painting is superior to music in that, here, the time element becomes a spatial Moreover, in terms of the temporal sense of polyphonic painting, element. The notion of simultaneity stands out even more richly. To illustrate Aliup (plate shows that in order to control the color relations the retrograde motion which I am thinking up for music, I remember the 7)

mirror image in the windows of the moving trolley" (Paul Klee, The Diaries in place one must think in terms of spherical relations. This is the

of Paul Klee, 1898-1918, ed. Felix Klee [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964], #1081). 71 Klee, The Nature of Nature, 125-28. 72 Klee, Dos bildnerische Denken, 456-511. same case for The Scales of Twilight (plate 5) where the same

colors (red and blue) work differently before crossing, in cross-

ing, and after crossing.

13, From the poetic serenity of Late Evening Looking Out of the

Woods ( Spat Abends aus dem Wald geblickt ( plate to ) 1937; 8) the many layered polyphonic Printed Sheet with Pictures (plate

36) if one follows Klee's vision and insight, one realizes that what

was once taken to be a window into nature becomes a temporal-

izing event that draws mind and heart into the very movement

of originary life-giving. In this sense, the work of art no longer

copies nature; rather pictures "make visible those things that were 73 seen in secret." Our discussion has been guided by the same

aim Klee has in his lecture of 1 924, namely to introduce his vision

of the work of art and its content by offering an introduction to

a way of seeing that no longer identifies painting with nature. At

the same time, in following this argument one sees that the work

of art may offer insight into life and nature in their very originary

movement. The artist and the philosopher touch at the limit of

nature in seeking knowledge beyond all appearances. But they

touch only to slip into the difference that we have marked from

the outset of the discussion, since this insight is not, cannot be

equated with conceptual knowledge organized around linguistic

expression alone, nor with the study of nature as pragmatic facts

to be analyzed and explained. Klee's work calls forth the philo-

sophical gaze and marks its limit, but does so in a tantalizing

manner, inviting, enticing, coercing, exposing the rational to the

subconscious experience through which life-giving force may be

channeled and may be experienced as works of art occur in their

form-giving events. 74

73 Klee, "On Modern Art," 14.

74 Klee's works respond to an aesthetic tradition that seeks the channeling of

life-giving force through the form-giving creative force of the work of art.

Such cosmological reading of Klee would put him, and us, close to the work of Joseph Beuys, who understood the work of art as a transferring of

energy, as well as to the magic paintings of Haiti and Africa, close also to the famous photographs of the now extinct Selk'nam or Onas of Patagonia—

images of living bodies that in their form-giving channel the life-giving force behind nature—painted bodies that could have very well been painted by

Klee himself (their similarity with figures such as the one in Printed Sheet

with Pictures [plate 36] is impossible to miss). In engaging Klee's works one

finds a place perhaps wider than our present imagination, a place that in

our being exposed to Klee's works remains for us to inhabit. (The Austrian

anthropologist and priest Martin Gusinde traveled to Patagonia four times

between 1918 and 1924. During his travels he photographed the Selk'nam

or Onas and their rituals, which included painted bodies. The images were

originally published in Los indios de Tierra del Fuego. Some of the images

may be found in Anne Chapman, Hain: Ceremonia de iniciacion [Las Lajas: Zagier and Urruty, 2008].)

Claudia Baracchi Paul Klee: Self-Portrait of the Artist as a Tree

There are two mountains on which the weather is bright and clear, the mountain of the

beasts and the mountain of the gods. But between them lies the crepuscular valley of

human beings. If perchance one of them gazes upward, he is seized by a premonitory,

unquenchable yearning, he who knows that he does not know, for those that do not know

that they do not know and those who know that they know.

—Paul Klee 1

Da stieg ein Baum. O reine Ubersteigung!

—Rainer Maria Rilke 2

"My friend, in the sacred temple of Zeus at Dodona they said that the first prophetic speeches came into being from an oak tree. Now, for those of that time, given that they were not wise like you young people, it was sufficient, because of their simplemindedness, to hear from an oak and a rock, if only they should speak the truth; for you, however, perhaps it makes a difference who the speaker is and from what country. For you do not sim-

." 3 ply consider whether it is so or otherwise These words addressed by Socrates to his young interlocutor in the

Phaedru bear the trace of a remote symbolism—the tree as the pivot around which human life organizes itself in its distinctive exchange (in its conversation) with the other than human. The tree indicates the mediation between above and below, connecting earth and sky, the self-secluding and the maximally disclosed, dark density and luminescent rarefaction—finally, the invisible and the visible. It is, then, a locus of articulation, of harmonization in the literal sense of (con)junction.

In diverse cultures the tree points to the center of pulsating life, the pole on which the cosmos as a whole

4 hinges . Again, we find a trace of this ancient figure in Plato, who imagines the movement of the spheres and

5 of nature as such around an adamantine column of light . Highlighted here is the cosmic tree as creative principle—the axis at once mysterious and fulgent, source and sustenance of generation. The cipher of the tree

1 Paul Klee, The Diaries of Paul Klee, 1898-1918, ed. Felix Klee (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964), #539.

2 Rainer Maria Rilke, Die Sonette an Orpheus 1 (Leipzig: Insel, 1923), 7.

3 Plato, Phaedrus 275b-c. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.

4 See for instance Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, trans. Willard R. Trask (San Diego: Flarcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987).

5 Plato, Republic 1 0.614-21 . Consider also the luminescent olive tree of the Qur'an, "neither in the West nor in the East" but in

the center (Sura 24 "An-Nur" ["The Light"], 35); or the ficus religi osa (pipal tree, banyan tree) in the vicinity of which dwelled the naked goddesses of the pre-Aryan civilizations of the Indus Valley, archaic indication of the feminine, generative character

of the tree (whose Latin noun, arbor, is feminine although inflected in the masculine). Masculine and feminine, stretching upward

and downward in its verticality and growing in its rotundity, the tree is a cipher of bisexuality, of the balanced complexity and

completeness of the hermaphrodite. In the Upanishads the same tree (also called asfiwafffia), turned upside down, images the

cosmos, rooted high above in Brahman, endlessly regenerating, growing its branches downward into the elemental Katha Upa- (

nishad 2.3.1 ). Again, under this tree the Buddha will be enlightened. 35 synthesizes the mystery of the divine and of life, and images the precisely, in the 1 924 lecture in Jena, Klee develops the image of the

13 knowledge thereof—consider the Sephirothic tree of life described artist by reference to that of the tree. By offering a "glimpse into the by the Zohar in terms of radiance and in connection with the power painter's workshop," Klee wishes to catch key elements of the human

14 of word, or the biblical tree of the knowledge of good and evil, or experience at large. Far from extraneous and "altogether apart,"

6 the upside down banyan tree that the Bhagavad Gita identifies the artist is "a being who, like you, unasked, was cast into a manifold

15 with the knowledge of the Veda. world, and who, like you, willing or not must find his or her way."

For Joachim of Fiore, the twelfth-century mystic and theologian, The artist, then, shares the basic conditions with the rest of human- the tree indicates worldly becoming, particularly in the aspect of kind, is planted in the same ground. Only he may perhaps be more growth and, hence, of temporality. It provides the image of the slow apt at coursing through life in virtue of his "specific means"—"a being development and sedimentation of epochs, thanks to which Joachim perhaps happier.. .than the one who does not create and achieves

7 16 articulates the succession of the ages in his vision of history. In the no release through real form-giving [Gesfa/fung]." twentieth century Wassily Kandinsky still resorts to this symbol of In this context, Klee continues, the issue is casting light on "those quiet accretion to designate the millenary process of decantation, parts of the creative process. ..which during the formation of a work

8 17 purification, and spiritualization of art. unfold mostly in the subconscious [im UnterbewuBten]." The task

But the tree is not only a cosmic, cosmological, and cosmogonic involves relieving "the formal aspect" of some of the "conscious"

9 figure. Beyond the living cosmos in its axial organization, cohe- emphasis usually attributed to it, and setting into relief "the aspect

18 siveness, and dynamism, the tree evokes as well the human micro- of content." Intuiting the artist's endeavor in its compositeness,

10 cosm. Once more resorting to the image of a tree, Plato delineates organic character, and systemic integration (the artistic phenom- the essential traits of the human: the human being is the upside down enon in the likeness of a tree), Klee undertakes to unfold its ramifica- tree rooted in the sky and turning its flowering, creative organs tions and carefully join its various components: toward the earth—an inversion intimating the human as a reflection,

11 a mirror image of the divine. In the human is the descent of the sky Allow me to employ a simile, the simile of the into the earth, and the earth's creative response. While belonging tree. The artist has studied this manifold world in the earthly element, and therefore fruitfully enacting itself in ways and has, so we may suppose, somehow found always local and irreducibly singular, the human being remains his way in it, quietly. FHe is so well oriented that connected to the openness of the all-embracing sky, and in virtue he can bring order to the flight of appearances of this may cultivate the consciousness of its own participation in a and experiences. This orientation in the things choral unity. Both celestial and abysmal, the human being stretches of nature and of life, this multifarious ramified

12 out and branches into heaven and earth. and branching order, I would liken to the root

Allowing this image to vibrate in its broad symbolic resonance, system of the tree. From here the juices flow to ranging from the modest, young tree to the cosmic tree designating the artist, passing through him and through his creation as well as the creator god, Paul Klee undertakes to illumi- eye. Thus he stands in the position of the trunk. nate the human being under the aspect of artistic creativity. More Battered and moved by the power of the flow,

he introduces what he is seeing into the work.

Just as the crown of the tree visibly expands in 6 Bhagavad Gita 15.2.

7 See especially Joachim's magnificent work of imaginal theology known as every direction in time and in space, so does

Liber Figurarum, in II Libro delle Figure dellAbate Gioachino da Fiore, ed. the work. 19 L. Tondelli, M. Reeves, and B. Hirsch-Reich (Turin: SEI, 1990).

8 Wassily Kandinsky, "Malerei als reine Kunst," Der Sturm 4, nos. 178-79

(Sept. 1913): 98-99. The artist is presented first of all in his ordering work—not unlike

9 This symbolic halo still suggestively resounds through one of Rilke's Poemes the demiourgos in Plato's Timaeus, engaged in an act of cosmic francais, where the walnut tree is envisioned in its stability and expanding

roundness Arbre qui, de sa place, fierement arrondit tout autour cet craftsmanship that involves not so much creating out of nothing, ( / / espace de I'ete accompli, rond et abondant, fou/ours au milieu de / // // / but rather the arrangement and harmonization of that which is al- tout ce qui I'entoure— / arbre qui savoure / la voute entiere des deux, // il developpe en rond son etre), vibrantly alive and yet unmoved, marking the

passing of the seasons and yet abiding in plenitude. The poem suggests that

this is at once an image of wisdom: Arbre qui peut-etre / pense au dedans: 13 The lecture was given on January 26, 1924 on the occasion of an exhibit

/ antique Arbre-mattre, // Arbre qui se domine, / se donnant lentement / at the Kunstverein in Jena and addressed the general public. It was first la forme qui elimine / les hasards du vent ("Le noyer" [1924], in Poemes published in 1945 (Paul Klee, Uber die moderne Kunst [Bern: Benteli]), francais [Paris: Hartman, 1933]). subsequently translated into English by Paul Findlay (Paul Klee, On Modern 10 Again, in Rilke's verse: O, der ich wachsen will, / ich s eh hinaus, und in mir Art [London: Faber and Faber, 1948]). The quotations following are from

wachst der Baum ("Es winkt zu Fuhlung fast aus alien Dingen" [1914], in the German text of the lecture included (under the title "Ubersicht und Samtliche Werke, ed. Ernst Zinn, vol. 2 [Frankfurt: Insel, 1956], 93). Orientierung auf dem Gebiet der bildnerischen Mittel und ihre raumliche

11 Plato, Timaeus 90a. Ordnung") in Paul Klee, Form- und Gestaltungslehre I: Das bildnerische

12 In Jung's historical-psychoanalytic study on "The Philosophical Tree," this Denken, ed. Jurg Spiller (Basel: Schwabe, 1956), 81 -96.

archetype is examined as one of the most evocative figures of humanity: 14 Klee, "Ubersicht und Orientierung," in Das bildnerische Denken, 81.

in the drawings byjung's patients as well as the alchemists' descriptions of 15 Ibid., 81-82.

the arbor philosophica, the tree simultaneously bespeaks the source of life 16 Ibid., 82.

and maternal protection, individual renewal and fulfillment, knowledge and 17 Ibid., 81.

study. Carl G. Jung, "Der philosophische Baum," in Von den Wurzeln des 18 Ibid.

Bewusstseins (Zurich: Rascher, 1954). 19 Ibid., 82. 20 ways already there, only in confusing disarray and fugitive. The

artistic labor sustains the round expansiveness of the work, prop-

agating in all directions and indefinitely. At the same time, the

artist is shown in his defenseless exposure to the wild flow of the The tree, then, stands as the figure (indeed, as the necessity) of a worldly elements coursing through and around him—again, not connection—a conjunction between above and below which is most

unlike the condition of mortals in Timaeus, finding themselves in evident in the function of the trunk. At stake is the exchange and

the midst of the sublunar world as in a raging river, overwhelmed interpenetration between the visible and the invisible, that which

by the currents of nutrition traversing them and the shaking and withdraws into non-manifestation and that which is inundated with

21 shifting of the elemental surroundings. light, imageless repose and the flow of mutability. At the center of

The artist's self-portrait, thus, shows him at once in his impos- such dynamics, the artist disciplines the passage from one side to

ing firmness and in his fragility. Like the tree, even if "battered and the other and decides regarding their relationship—thus determin-

moved" the artist holds fast, presents a peculiar ability to withstand, ing his comportment vis-a-vis the requirements of phenomenal veri-

endure, and even to orient himself and thrust his own ordering similitude, imitation, and representation. More broadly, however, it

vision into the fleeting world. Klee's 1919 self-portrait Absorption pertains to the human to inhabit such an intermediate field, to live

Versunkenheit (plate eloquently makes visible the movements in and such tension and, thus, to confront the ongoing work ( ) 41 ), as a

of such an exuberant energy. The lithograph depicts the face of the of balancing opposite forces, re-integrating the disaggregating ten-

artist in the effort of concentration. The mustering of superabundant dencies, drawing one's course in the midst of divergent pulls, at

23 resources surfacing yields an effect of nearly unsustainable inten- each step finding a unique synthesis.

sity, as if the somatic traits were on the verge of being undone by it. The labor of art is in the first place illuminated in its ascend-

At the same time, the visage conveys an impression of deep stillness ing thrust. Engaged in the movement from the depth, darkness, and

and repose. Sunk into its own root, quietly balanced on the trunk of

the neck and on the even shoulders, the shape of the head spreads an individual. The art of mastering life is the prerequisite for all further forms of expression, whether they are paintings, sculptures, tragedies, or out, light and effortless, like the crown of a tree, the facial features

musical compositions. Not only to master life in practice, but to shape it themselves echoing the shapes and veins of foliage. But the condi- meaningfully within me and to achieve as mature an attitude before it as

tion of the artist is mirrored just as much in the 1935 drawing of a possible. Obviously this isn't accomplished with a few general precepts

but grows like nature. A Weltanschauung will come of itself; the will alone little tree ( Little Tree Baumchen plate perhaps a young oak, ) ( ; 9), doesn't determine which direction will yield the clearest path: this is partly conveying a sense of marked vulnerability and tentativeness—finite settled in the maternal womb and is ordained by fate.... Advancing along and far from invincible. a spiritual path: with every step, more solitary.... Fearfully sober things, these: the canvas, the painting surface, the base. Not much more exciting: If the artist is similar in function to the trunk of a tree, then all the tracing of lines, the treatment of forms. Over it all, light, the creation

possibility of artistic creation (of the passage and translation from of space through light. Any content is prohibited for the time being. The

purely pictorial style. How far away the true experience of these things roots to flowering branches) is predicated upon the nature of the

still is! For the time being, the notion of the art of living is more fascinating" intermediary, that is, upon the way in which the mediation takes it is in (#41 1 /412). Note that not sufficient to be biologically alive order to

place, the way in which the medial figure of the artist carries out and live, let alone to experience, as an individuated being. Yet, the necessary

integration (the "art of life") need not bespeak a formative operation simply inflects the translation. For he or she is the translating. And he or she (willfully) imposed on the physiological/natural layer of life, as if the latter is always singular. In this light, it appears that the artist's way of life were primordially amorphous. On the contrary, becoming "an individual"

is as crucial to the artistic outcome as are his technical skills, studies, entails acknowledging and trusting the guidance of nature, and essentially

(if not exclusively) entrusting one's development to it—trusting, that is, that in and talents—to the point that it could be said that a decisive aspect its womb shapes and paths will make themselves available. of the artist's task is tending to his own development and becoming, 23 Klee underscores the in-between character of the domain designated

holding himself as his own most crucial work. The task of forming, of by the trunk—the setting of artistic operation, the poetic laboratory, but also the human condition as such. In his Bauhaus notes, such a domain imposing shapes and configuration, is at one with that of self-forma- is the Zwischenraum or Zwischengebiet exposed to macroscopic and

tion. As Klee puts it, the creativity involved in art crucially demands microscopic dynamism (between the "egg" and "death"), where the static

is desirously open to the freedom of the dynamic (Klee, Das bildnerische an education in the art of life. Art is nurtured by artful living. This is Denken, 5, 191, 388). Henry Corbin illumines the intermediate world an ubiquitous concern in the artist's diaries—to quote one of the most as the mundus imaginalis in which the coming, the surfacing, of images

concise (and earliest) formulations: "In the spring of 1901 I drew up is tended to (Corbin, "Mundus imaginalis ou I'imaginaire et I'imaginal," Cahiers internati onaux du symbolisme 6 [1964]: 3-26). The mention of the following program: First of all the art of life; then, as ideal profes- Corbin is especially significant in this context, because of his development sion, poetry and philosophy; as real profession, the plastic arts; and of the theme of imagination (in the wake of the Persian and Arabic 22 finally, for lack of an income, drawing illustrations." philosophers) as imaginatio vera—as a mode of perception of the truth,

in no way hierarchically subjugated by conceptual thinking and the

discourses of rationality, but rather equiprimordial with them. In a distant

20 The locus c/ossicus of the meditation on sensibility and experience in their and yet not unrelated environment, let us also recall Deleuze's elaborations

fleeting character, restless motility, and constant dissipation is Aristotle's of conceptuality as a matter of creativity, and hence the juxtaposition (on

art, Posterior Analytics Beta 19. the shared ground of poiesis ) of image and concept, and therefore of

21 Plato, Timaeus 42e-44c. science, and philosophy (e.g., Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Qu'est-ce

22 Klee, Diaries, #137. The following entry in the diary, from June 1902, is que la philosophie? [Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1991]). On imagination in

even more eloquent in this regard, as it lucidly sets into relief the themes of connection with the present considerations: "Imagination is a tree," notes

organic growth, finitude of the will, life and experience itself as not simply Gaston Bachelard, emphasizing the mediating role of the tree, its living in

given but as tasks, needing assiduous exercise and attention: "Actually, the earth and wind, its integrative function (Bachelard, La terre et les reveries

main thing now is not to paint precociously but to be or, at least, to become du repos: Essai sur les images de I'intimite [Paris: Corti, 1948], 300). invisibility of roots to the flowers, fruits, and ecstasies of making vis- From type to prototype! [Vom Vorbildlichen ible, art presents itself as transformation and transmutation, trans- zum Urbildlichen!] Presumptuous will be the figuration and purification—as a genuinely alchemical operation in artist who arrests himself soon somewhere in which the artist himself is the athanor, the vessel of a certain blend- the process. But chosen are those artists who ing: "standing at the place allotted to him, the trunk, he does noth- today get through into the vicinity of that secret ing other than gathering and leading forward that which comes ground where the primordial law [c/as Urge- from the depths. He neither serves nor rules, he only mediates. He sefz] nurtures all developments. There where truly holds a modest position. And the beauty of the crown is not he the central organ of all temporal and spatial

24 himself, it has only passed through him." motility [Bewegfhe/f]—call it brain or heart of

And yet, the reverse movement is equally essential, descending creation—activates every function; who would from above into the dark earth—head down into the roots, to bring not, as an artist, dwell there? In the womb 25 there study, exploration, focused perception. "Our beating heart of nature, in the primordial ground [/m Urgr- drives us down to the roots, deep down to the primordial ground und of creation, where the secret key to all is |

26 31 [zum Urgrund]." The point is less undertaking to overcome the guarded? opacity and resistance of the withdrawn (as if this were a possible, accessible task) than bringing to it a trained sensibility, the capacity In this plunging investigation the artist may dare to imagine radi- for a refined and orienting receptiveness. It is not a matter of making cally reconfigured perceptual regimes—intimating, among other the obscure clear, thus violating it in its obscurity, but learning to take things, that there are languages beyond human languages (for the obscure in as obscure: learning to allow shapes and images to instance, the speaking of trees); that beyond instituted and histori- surface, even in their unintelligibility or non-conformity to visual data, cally sedimented semantic codifications we need not posit incho- 27 and hence in their unsettling traits. In this reverse sinking movement ate chaos; thus, that immense horizons of communication, com- is imaged the in-depth study of nature, going down into it to receive monality, transposition, and structured interdependence have yet orientation within it—or rather, to catch a glimpse of its disconcerting to be acknowledged. In this respect, consider the semiotic syntax

transformative power, of its infinite instability, velocity, and mutabil- exposed in the drawing Perception of an Animal ( Erkenntnis eines ity. At stake in this going down is the possibility of understanding Tieres plate or the texture of Green Terrain grunes ) (1925; 4), (

nature more profoundly and otherwise, of staying with it even in its Gelande ( 1 plate or the analysis of dimly lit receptacles ) 93 8; 1 ), invisibility and unfathomed mystery, divining the compositeness of in an untitled pastel, dated around 1937 (plate 26). In such a 28 phenomena and the togetherness, in them, of visible and invisible. downward looking study (which permeates nature, percolates,

Again, the descent into the earth has to do with unearthing, divines), the root in the sky (the head and its luminosity) enters the however provisionally and intermittently, structures and hieroglyphs earth and animates it with vision. The dreams, ideas, or fantasies 29 ("dream, idea, fantasy" constituting the archaic ground and pul- thus released may "render the seen more or less vivaciously," but ) 30 32 sating heart of phenomena, sustaining their ongoing change. It above all "make that which is secretly beheld visible [s/chfbar]." involves remaining more intimately true to nature than naturalism, The movement into the earth initiates a fruitful exchange with it, which treats the surface superficially, failing to understand its depth, bringing the earth, in turn, out of itself. Earth surfaces, in response, i.e., non-simplicity and metamorphic vitality: are somehow brought out into the open, in a rapturous upward

movement. The study in the invisible and of the invisible propels

33 a movement upward, into the light, yielding images. The earthly 24 Klee, "Ubersicht und Orientierung," 82. 25 On the twofold movement of ascent and descent, consider also the

observations in the essay "Wege des Naturstudiums" (first published in 31 Klee, "Ubersicht und Orientierung," 93.

Staatliches Bauhaus 1919- 1923 [Weimar: Bauhaus, 1923] and included 32 Ibid. Here Klee returns to the opening statement of the earlier essay

in Klee, Das bildnerische Denken, 63-68), especially regarding the "Schopferische Konfession," originally published in Tribune der Kunst und common earthly root (upward way) and cosmic commonality (downward der Zeit: Eine Schriftensammlung, ed. Kasimir Edschmid (Berlin: Eric Reiss,

way). 1920). The essay is included in Klee, Das bildnerische Denken, 76-80.

26 Klee, "Ubersicht und Orientierung," 93. See also "Wege des Naturstudiums," 63. The artistic injunction to "make

27 In the essay "exakte versuche im bereich der kunst" Klee addresses the visible" sichtbar machen is in turn inscribed in the 1926 To Make Visible ( )

study of what lies "at the root," "below," as an education in the "prehistory" (plate 59). At the source of the creative drive one already finds scratches

of the visible—an education allowed by a shift in emphasis from finished form and traces of writing—an inscription, a finely incised arabesque...

to function. The text was first published in Bauhaus Zeitschrift fur Gestaltung 33 It is barely the case to mention, by mere assonance, the centrality of the

2.2 in 1928 and is included in Klee, Das bildnerische Denken, 69-71 . Klee earth, in connection with the artistic phenomenon, in Heidegger's essay

returns to the question of prehistory in other notes as well, emphasizing the "The Origin of the Work of Art" (conceived in the mid-1930s and published

contact with it as the condition of artistic creation (Das bildnerische Denken, in Martin Heidegger, Holzwege, in Gesamtausgabe, vol. 5 [Frankfurt:

99 and 168). Klostermann, 1950]). It is clear, however, that the themes of the origin

28 In this sense art presents itself as genuine investigation—as a mode of of the work from out of the earth or phusis, art as the event and advent

approach, exploration, and analysis yielding an understanding of the of disclosure, and above all the connection between earth and sky are

world. Again, as recalled above by reference to Deleuze, we catch a developed by the two thinkers in inassimilable directions. Suffice it to note

glimpse of the intertwinement of the arts, sciences, and philosophy as the tension between Heidegger's elaboration of the conjunction as strife

irreducible ways of knowledge. (earth and world, constitutively joined and divided in the erection of the

29 Klee, "Ubersicht und Orientierung," 93. Greek temple) and Klee's deployment of the symbolism of the tree. Here

30 Such a descent has to do with reaching into the "mystery," giving it form, as I limit myself to referring to Stephen H. Watson, "Heidegger, Paul Klee,

Klee observes in a preliminary sketch of "exakte versuche im bereich der and the Origin of the Work of Art," The Review of Metaphysics 60, no. 2

kunst," in Klee, Das bildnerische Denken, 60. (Dec. 2006): 327-57; Siegbert Peetz, "Welt und Erde: Heidegger und ; -

root, stirred by an imaginal apprehending, sends forth offshoots Such is the case for the artist compelled to study nature, not only with ascending energy: wings and birds, jugglers, flights, ghosts, in its fruits coming to the fore, but in its foregrounding and self- tumblers, insects, eidola, endless variations on the theme of air. dissimulating labor—the inconspicuous granting, the teeming, var-

Consider, in this regard, Concert on the Branch [ Konzert auf dem iegated energies pervading it.

Zweig) plate Tightrope Walker [ Seiltanzer (1921; 40), ) (1923; plate Entertainer in April (Gaukler im April plate 20), ) (1928; 22), and Entertainer Festival (Gaukler-fest) (1932; plate 23). Or the joyous crossing of the sky (constellated by tree, celestial city, planetary And yet, it is precisely in connection with the necessity of defor-

graphemes) in The Scales of Twilight ( Die Waage der Dammerung) mation that the artist on this path of research experiences his insular-

(1921; plate 5), with the precarious acrobat balancing within the ity, his alienation from the people of his time. Paradoxically enough, patterns of vectors of force and world lines. he must undergo the path os of severance and dis-integration with

In the translation from the depth of the roots into the height of the respect to his own environment. Klee expounds the basic features of branches, however, deformation occurs. The image, brought forth the polemical encounter with his contemporaries: out of the roots, and coursing through the trunk, is diverted in its flow. The artist is a locus of inflection or deflection, and this is not No one would demand that the tree form the due to subjective, arbitrary motifs, let alone to caprice or technical crown precisely like the root. Anyone would deficiency. The trunk is a bridge, a place of passage in between, understand that between above and below and as such belongs in the broader, more articulate system of the there can be no exact specular relation. It is living tree: root and branches, soil and air, moisture and warmth, clear that different functions in different el- and lives variously circulating, intersecting, interpenetrating. Himself emental domains must yield vivid divergences. an organism, the artist belongs in the organic structure of aliveness But precisely the artist is at times denied these traversing and surrounding him—a togetherness vibrant and rip- divergences from the model, which are neces- pling. As a place of passage and transmutation, the artist assists the sary from a creative standpoint. This has gone metabolism of nature in its endless work of self-regeneration and so far in eagerness that he has even been self-renewal, necessarily and irreducibly entailing distortion: charged with powerlessness and deliberate 36 falsification.

I have already spoken of the relationship of

crown to root, of work to nature, and have elu- The tree, then, finds itself rooted in unpropitious terrain, exposed

cidated the difference by reference to the two to hostile elements—"battered and moved," in fact, on the verge

different domains of earth and air, and the cor- of being uprooted. The people of the present time cannot, for

respondingly different functions of depth and the most part, meet the artist where he is, on his plane and at his

height. In the work of art, likened to the crown place—at the center, in the experience of dynamic contacts. In

of the tree, at stake is the deforming necessity this regard, a series of nine drawings from 1933 (plates 46-54)

due to the entrance into the specific dimen- is telling in its iconographic and stylistic uniformity: the people

sions of the imaginal [c/es Bildnerischen ]. For brandishing a superficial naturalism in defense of the tradition 34 37 there stretches out the rebirth of nature. is the same people violating, hunting, and discriminating. It is

one and the same people that admires the equestrian monument,

Distortion is originary and inevitable. Deformation inheres in the holding it as the model of the artwork (The Work of Art [c/as very emergence of form. This is so because at stake is not a move- Kunstwerk; plate and practices "manhunting" Manhunt 53]) ( ment from image to image, a translation internal to the visual [Menschenjagd; plate 49]). Again, the common intonation of paradigm, let alone a reproduction. Rather, it belongs to the ar- these drawings shows that it is one and the same people that tistic endeavor to throw bridges across radically discontinuous unimaginatively clings to images, in the poverty of appearanc- realms and toward the image, to receive transmissions and send es, and perpetrates violence in a variety of modes—whether by them forth along evanescent paths, to sustain the visible propaga- thrusting the spear or pointing the finger Accusation in the Street ( 35 tion of invisibility—the differing and deferred flowering of roots. [ Anklage auf der Strasse; plate 47], Violence [ Gewalt plate 46],

Barbarian Mercenary [Barba ren-Soldner; plate 51], Double

Paul Klee," Heidegger Studies 2 (1995): 167-87; and Heinrich Wiegand Murder [ Doppel mord; plate 50], and Militarism of Witches [ m/7/ Petzet, Encounters and Dialogues with Martin Heidegger, 1919-1976, tarismus der Hexen; plate 52]). trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1993). The only intimacy displayed by the conduct of pencil and chalk

34 Klee, "Ubersicht und Orientierung," 86. is with the figures of those hunted: the closer look at the emigrants in

35 Not surprisingly, Klee's research is extremely relevant for Merleau-Ponty. Emigrating [aus wandern; plate 54), the carefully described gesture This is clear, e.g., in L'oeil et I'esprit (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), but also in the

systematic developments in his last courses at the College de France and Le

visible et /'invisible (Paris: Gallimard, 1964). Here I limit myself to referring 36 Klee, "Ubersicht und Orientierung," 82.

to Mauro Carbone, '"Rendere visibile': Merleau-Ponty e Paul Klee," in 37 This is of course an outstanding year, for both the Bauhaus and Klee himself,

Fenomenologia e arte: Immagini e figure rifle sse nella filosofia, ed. Markus who was forced to resign his post at the Dusseldorf Academy and retreat to Ophalders (Milan: Mimesis, 2005), 99-110. Bern. 40 of surprise of the hunted caught in an interior in Manhunt (Intimate "professional activity," and it is through such a knowledge of

Scene) ( Menschenjagd [intime Scene]; plate 48), or the attentive the craft that it may become possible for the artist "to reach out

41 contrast between the pointed shapes of the aggressors and the into dimensions far removed from the conscious process." The airy, almost angelic figure of the prey, softly dissipating already in conscious endeavor must be pursued to its limit and may, at the its flight (Manhunt). The rest are black heaps of extinguished life, limit, make possible its own transgression—as if in a movement of nearly indistinct traces of organicity, disarticulated shadows. self-transcendence. Here, Klee warns, lies the most severe dan-

The environment of the artist, then, is neither especially respon- ger, for this is "the place where one can miss the greatest and sive to nor supportive of art's necessities. Klee seems to describe most substantial contents and fail, despite the soul's most exqui- 42 such a context in Medley of Little People ( allerlei kleines Volk site talent in that direction." )

plate or Small World ( Kleinwelt plate But what should be highlighted at this juncture is that the artist (1932; 29) ) (1914; 34), both of which entail a gaze from above—a bird's or god's remote is a mediator in yet another sense. To be sure, mediating between gaze, revealing what is seen as both microscopically irrelevant and nature and art, he brings forth the artistic creation (as we saw, remarkable in its overall structure. Yet, the artistic path he has taken mediation, the frequentation of thresholds, is presented as a neces- necessitates the divergence from customary models and imitative sary condition for fecundity and fruitfulness). However, mediating comportment. It is in this predicament that the desire arises to divine between the work of art and a public coarse and unprepared, he and foster other modes of humanity, to explore more fully being strives to bring forth another human being. Sharing fragments of the human and being together, to prepare the ground for an as yet artistic experience and its discipline with the public, he undertakes unseen people. In the joyful projection of image, in the bringing to teach, reshape, bring about transformation in the public's basic forth through the trunk, all the way into the leaves, is folded the attitude.

artist's longing for a people that is missing. But imagining an other Thus, when Klee notes: "besides, I do not wish at all to present

43 people, calling for a people to come, means also being involved in the human being as he is, but only as he also could be" —we may the creative effort of bringing it forth, the commitment to contributing hear this statement in its twofold range of implications. Doubtlessly to such an arrival. This is also why this lecture is above all an attempt at issue here is the investigation of phenomena and the presentation at educating, at informing the public—not in the sense of giving infor- of the human being through artistic work (the question of deforma- mation, but rather of shaping sensibility, training the gaze, opening tion and the contestation of mimesis). And yet, equally at issue is it up to another age. Such an endeavor is complementary and at the investigation and bringing forth of the human being through the the same time irreducible to Klee's teaching commitments in aca- conscious work of relation, exchange, education. The question of demic or professional contexts, paradigmatically at the Bauhaus. abstraction from representational codes and the issue of psycho-

The overall purpose of the Jena lecture is explicit from the start. political renewal echo each other, indeed, follow the same laws.

It is important to underscore that at stake is not simply a declaration Both entail a descent. Indeed, drawing back into the roots, standing 44 of poetics, whether individual or collective, let alone a theoretical "at the place allotted to him," that of the trunk, the artist receives decoding of the works exhibited. Klee displays in no uncertain terms the strength to withstand the battering and vicissitudes, whether ele- his concern with the visual education required for approaching the mental or political. Moreover, such a descent into unlit prehistory work of art and the many-layered deformations it presents—an edu- yields insight. Whether going deep down into nature's workshop cation nurturing the perception of the work as a "phenomenon of so as to set up the artist's workshop or going down into the fabric

38 simultaneous multi-dimensionality," despite the inadequacies of of collective dynamics so as actively to intervene in them, the call is didactic language and the strictures of language as such in its dia- for exploring potentiality and possibility, divining the latent, releas- chrony: ing the dormant, blind, or blindfolded into its own unfolding. It is a

matter of construction and formation—of assisting in the advent of

But perhaps I can make myself understood to the work that is not yet, of the people as yet missing, of a flowering 45 the point that the phenomenon of the multi- perhaps to come.

dimensional contact may be experienced, in

one work or another, more easily and quickly. 40 Ibid., 88.

As a humble mediator, who does not identify 41 Ibid.

42 Ibid. himself with the crown, I may perhaps bring 43 Ibid., 95. This statement is but one variation on an abiding theme in Klee. 39 into your view a rich, radiant light. A journal entry from early 1901 already exposes the issue lucidly and its

implications: "Thoughts about the art of portraiture. Some will not recognize

the truthfulness of my mirror. Let them remember that I am not here to reflect In accordance with this illuminative pedagogical program, Klee the surface (this can be done by the photographic plate), but must penetrate proceeds to a formal analysis of the dimensions of measure, inside. My mirror probes down to the heart. I write words on the forehead weight, and quality, developed through the examination of line, and around the corners of the mouth. My human faces are truer than the real ones" (Klee, Diaries, #136). tone, and color. The study and mastery of the formal elements 44 Klee, "Ubersicht und Orientierung," 82. constitutes the culmination of the artist's "conscious creation" and 45 Italo Calvino notes that Klee is "an artist possessing a great genetic force....

He is one giving himself over to future art. All he does is opening up new

avenues, which perhaps he himself is not that interested in developing, for

38 Klee, "Ubersicht und Orientierung," 86. right away he is concerned with opening up new ones, therefore everything

39 Ibid. he does is a gift to others." Thus, he adds, "Klee's overall image remains .

In the course of his formal analysis, Klee returns to the difficult me at most as a helpless ghost. For one only

relationship of the artist to the public, a relationship intermittently knows one's own objective passions. And ad- 46 displacing and constellated by "vehement misunderstandings." mittedly, in some cases, one is very delighted if

The layman seems to haunt the artist as an introjected form of con- perchance a familiar face emerges, as if of its 49 sciousness, silently making itself heard: own accord, in the artifact.

While the artist is still striving to group the for- The human to come is envisioned in the fading authoritativeness

mal elements with each other purely and logi- of the correspondence between formal structures and objective

cally, so that each in its place is necessary and content—of the model to which the work of formation would have

none clashes with the other, a layman, watch- to conform. Questioning and deactivating such an imposing au-

ing from behind, already utters the devastat- tomatism (which holds formation hostage and demotes it to re-

ing words: "But that is still very unlike uncle!" production and conformism) is central to the venture of artistic as

The artist, if his nerves are disciplined, thinks to well as political creativity. The mood of such a contestation may

himself: "Uncle here, uncle there! I must keep perhaps be glimpsed in the movement of oblique withdrawal and

building.... This new brick is, to begin with, a the gesture of refusal, at once soft and determined, in the 1940

bit too heavy and in my view moves the whole drawing No! ( Nein !) (plate 42).

thing too much to the left; I must add a not Crucial in entertaining the possibility of other modes of human-

insignificant counterweight on the right to es- ity, thus, is the cultivation of receptivity—free and exploratory like 50 tablish the equilibrium." And he keeps adding a "grazing animal." It is a matter of learning to sustain the fact

on one side and then the other, until finally the that, beyond our preconceptions and projections, "each formation, 47 scales are even. each combination will have its own peculiar constructive expres-

51 sion, each form its face, its physiognomy." It is a matter of learning

Again, Klee emphasizes that he is not concerned with physical how to look and being looked at in return, allowing the rest of life

appearances as correlates of stable paradigms—whether alleg- to have its own life and come forth accordingly. For "the objective

edly metaphysical or crystallized through habit and familiarity. images look at us serene or severe, more or less tense, comfort-

52 He is concerned, rather, with building and with constructive ne- ing or dreadful, suffering or smiling." But of course, the task of

cessities. As he proceeds to explicate, he is likewise concerned integrating such a posture can at most be inceptively announced:

with the investigation of appearances in their depth, of phenome- a vision delineating the horizon of a possible evolution— perhaps.

na haunted and stirred by the no longer and not yet phenomenal. In connection with the problem of the people to come, the people

Here lies the question of the visible in its temporal unfolding, as that is not yet, we may suggestively turn to Klee's numerous evoca-

the becoming never fully fathomed in its full range, and thus ex- tions of philosophers, birds, and other winged figures. But it may not

ceeding and subverting all pretense at stable codifications. With be inappropriate to emphasize, here, those works especially con-

respect to becoming, all iconographic conventions and sensory veying transformations still in progress, intermediate states, hybrid

habituation constitute an unwarranted prejudice. Sensation itself progressions, and thresholds: Hardly Still Walking, Not Yet Flying

is irreducible to biological automatism, and can thus be cultivat- [geht kaum mehr, fliegt noch nicht plate From Gliding ) (1927; 15), 48 ed, refined, trained—opening up to unprecedented vicissitudes: to Rising [von Gleiten zu Steigen) (1923; plate 18), Uneven Flight

( unebene Flucht plate and Superior Bird [ hoherer ) (1939; 14),

Therefore the contention revolves less around Vogel plate ) (1940; 16). the question of the existence of an object,

than around its appearance at any given

time, around its way [Art]. I will hope that the

layman, who in pictures always hunts [Jagd Such, then, would be the transformative and transformed

artist's his macht] for his particularly beloved object, domain of the labor. But Klee lingers on discussion of

may gradually die out within the range of my artistic creativity, attempting to illuminate further the artist's freedom

environment and, from now on, come to meet from the presumption of visual givenness—a freedom often leading

to "what appears to be such an arbitrary 'deformation' of the natu- 53 ral outward form." Yet, far from arbitrary, childlike, or even volubly

this universe of the possibilities of forms, always very recognizable. Klee is self-indulgent, artistic freedom is emphatically disclosed in its rigor so rich, so generous, but at the same time never eclectic, always himself" 54 necessity. For, unlike the realist critics," the artist, rather (Calvino, Mondo scr/ffo, mondo non scr/ffo [Milan: Arnoldo Modadori, and "many 2002], 66-67). 46 Klee, "Ubersicht und Orientierunq," 89.

47 Ibid. 49 Klee, "Ubersicht und Orientierung," 90. 48 As an instance of Klee's variations on a given theme (more precisely, 50 Klee, "Schopferische Konfession," 78.

on the figure of the tree), highlighting moments of his stylistic trajectory 51 Klee, "Ubersicht und Orientierunq," 91

from youth to the late works, see the brief survey in Paul Klee, Form- und 52 Ibid.

Gestaltungslehre 2: Unendliche Naturgeschichte, ed. Jurg Spiller (Basel: 53 Ibid., 92.

Schwabe, 1970), Ixiii-lxxix. 54 Later in the same lecture Klee will insist: the realist (any "Mister X") would ,

than attaching "a cogent significance to natural outward forms," Klee outlines, if in a minor mode, the romantic motif of the ecstatic

." 55 61 is more concerned with "the forming powers Klee insists on the mind, longing to be one with all, unbound, expansive : "He goes crucial shift in focus from the "final forms" to the "natural process of still further! He says to himself, remaining on this side: this world [at

." 56 ." 62 creation What absorbs the artist and his resources is the unfold- one time] looked different and [a later time] will look different ing of becoming in its time and place, the development of beings Then, in a vertiginous turn beyond this place, it seems likely to him 63 in ever changing, ever unstable and unfinished shapes, revealing a that "on other stars" altogether "other forms" have come to be . field of possibilities as yet unexhausted and the ongoing character Klee pointedly notes: "Such a mobility on the natural paths of cre-

is It of origination. ation a very good formative school [ Formungs-schule ]. has the

to vis- to The "natural process of creation" constantly brings potential move the maker [den Schaffenden ] from the ground up, ibility (makes visible, more broadly perceptible) the heretofore and he, himself in motion, will care for the freedom of the develop- 64 secluded and invisible. Artistic creation resonates with such a natu- ment, along his own paths of formation ." ral flow, reverberates its motility, ongoing labor, and unraveling. As observed above, the artist's ethos, the mark of his singularity,

Accordingly, the artist cultivates the keen awareness that the world is as essential to the outcome of the creative labor as technical mas-

." 57 in its present configuration "is not the one and only of all worlds tery and formal lucidity. Indeed, the way in which the artist steers

Above all, "with a penetrating glance he looks at the things that through life may either ensure or compromise the free development 58 nature leads before his eyes already formed ," divining in them and realization of the work: "This being the situation, one must their provenance and possible development, that which is no more make a concession to the artist, if he regards the present stage of and not yet visible. He thus contemplates time in and as the invis- the world of appearances immediately concerning him as acciden- ible infused in the mutable visibility of things. It is in this sense that tally fixed, temporally and locally fixed. As all too limited in contrast

." 65 his eye is piercing. And of course such a contemplation at once to his deeper vision and more vibrant feeling Whether reaching probes into the operations of nature and echoes them, deepens the out to the outermost reaches of the cosmos or reaching into the intimacy with nature's invisible forces and assists them, draws closer fibers of life, witnessing its microscopic shapes in restless mutation, into natural creativity and prolongs it. Not unlike the joyful god at the artist pursues the discipline of transcendence or overcoming 59 work, the artist appears closest to the act of natura naturans : of the illusion of fixity. In this perspective, sensing the unmastered

movement of life is at once a matter of undergoing, of surrender,

The deeper he looks, the more easily he can and a rigorously cultivated exercise—the exercise of "mobility"

stretch his point of view from today to yester- ( Beweglichkeitj of a "freedom that does not lead to determinate

day, the more he is impressed by the only es- phases of development, which in nature once were exactly so, or 66 sential image of creation, as genesis, rather will be, or could exactly be so. ..on other stars ." The artist's free-

than by the ready-made image of nature. Then dom "merely demands its right": the right to be, to unfold according

." 67 he allows himself the thought that creation can to its own necessity, "to be mobile, just as great nature is mobile

hardly be already complete today, and thus Thus stretched to the limit, at the limit not unlike a creator god,

stretches the act of world creation backward the artist enjoys the sweetness and endures the strictures of the

and forward: imparting duration to genesis endeavor: 60 [c/er Genesis Dauer verleihend].

Sometimes I dream of a work of really great

It is here that the proximity of artistic and political projects is breadth, ranging through the whole elemental, delineated most sharply. Thus understood, the artistic endeavor objective, content-related, and stylistic region. emerges in its essentially utopian character—as a visionary striv- This will certainly remain a dream, but it is ing to uncover, reveal, and lead forth that which may lie latent, good even now and then to entertain this possi- as yet invisible, yet to be found, invented, and released. Here we bility today still vague. Nothing can be rushed. catch sight of the artist's consciousness stretching out, agile and It must grow, it should grow of itself, and if the unrestrained, to embrace and compose the most comprehensive time ever comes for that work, then so much the view, including that which is nowhere now. better! We must still go on seeking. We have

found parts, but not yet the whole. We do not

exclaim in great indignation: '"Those would be natural forms? This surely is

bad handicraft'" (ibid., 93). 61 Here at stake is not so much romanticism in its "crassly pathetic" stage,

55 Ibid., 92. but rather that "Romanticism that merges in the all [die im All aufgeht]"

56 Ibid. (ibid.). Elsewhere in his notes Klee associates romanticism with dynamism,

57 Ibid. and speaks of abstraction in art as a kind of romanticism without pathos,

58 Ibid. particularly as a response to the atrocity of the surrounding world (Das

59 On the artist as god, creating naturalness anew, see "Wege des bildnerische Denken, 191, 461 ). Naturstudiums," 67. On art as a resemblance of creation and on the 62 Klee, "Ubersicht und Orientierung," 92.

comforting experience of god-like bringing forth, see "Schopferische 63 Ibid., 93.

Konfession," 79-80. In a note on the concept of analysis, Klee deliberately 64 Ibid.

lays out the biblical overtone of the language of genesis he frequently 65 Ibid.

employs (Das bildnerische Denken, 99). 66 Ibid.

60 Klee, "Ubersicht und Orientierung," 92. 67 Ibid. yet have this ultimate power, for: no people is referring to the experimental community already under way at 68 supporting us [uns tragt kein Volk ]. But we the Bauhaus, not some kind of chimera but an established be- 69 seek a people, we began with this ... ginning. A patient god having reckoned with his own finitude,

capable of waiting, of sustaining frustration and partiality, the

"We," already in the plural, "began with this." He concludes artist keeps pursuing at once the work of art and his connection

with the people to come—a twofold search that is also a giving, 70 for here "we give all we have ." The gift of this research unearth- 68 This phrase (which he renders as le peuple manque), constitutes an orient-

ing catalyst for Deleuze, precipitating many moments of political imagina- ing the unprecedented may leave nothing, no one, intact. "More tion and igniting a vision of art in its revolutionizing power. At least three we cannot do ." 71 such moments should be mentioned here, because of their explicit cita-

tions of Klee and, above all, because they reveal the persistence, perva- siveness, and evocativeness of Klee's meditation within the philosopher's

workshop. First, the essay "Un manifesto di meno" ("One Less Manifesto,"

originally published in Carmelo Bene and Gilles Deleuze, Sovrapposizioni

[Milan: Feltrinelli, 1978]): Here art is developed in its politically poietic

vocation. Its task is not obtaining the consensus of the majority, appeal-

ing to everyone, let alone didactically representing the people's plight

and class conflict, but rather nurturing the conditions for the cultivation of

consciousness in a minor mode, for the exercise of a minority conscious-

ness, as everyone's potentiality for becoming. Not that the artist enjoys

a decisive authority in this respect: his authority is only "the authority of

a perpetual variation, in opposition to the power or despotism of the in-

variant.. .the authority, the autonomy of one stuttering, one who has con-

quered the right to stutter" (89). It is the authority of the foreigner—of one

who has become a foreigner "in one's own language" (79), finally, the authority of the nomad, the bastard, the animal. Here Deleuze echoes

Klee's statement in Bene's inflection, conveying more a sense of solitude

(the artist operating in a vacuum) than merely a perceived lack of support:

"Everyone claims to be part of the people, in the name of majoritarian

language, but where is the people? 'It is the people which is lacking'" (90).

Second, consider the 1987 lecture "Qu'est-ce que I'acte de crea-

tion?" (transcription of the recording at www.webdeleuze.com). Deleuze

lingers on the theme of art as an act of resistance: "Only the act of resis-

tance resists death, both in the form of the work of art and in the form of

a struggle of human beings. And what relation is there between the struggle of human beings and the work of art? The closest and, to me, most

mysterious relation. Exactly what Paul Klee meant when he said: 'You

know, the people is lacking [Vous savez, le peuple manque].' The people

is lacking and, at the same time, it is not lacking. The people is lacking,

this means that. ..this fundamental affinity between the work of art and

a people that does not yet exist, is not and will never be clear. There is

no work of art that does not appeal to a people that does not yet exist."

Third, consider Qu'est-ce que la philosophie? where this line of thinking

develops in its systematic force: "The creation of concepts in itself appeals to

a form of future, calls for a new earth and a people which do not yet exist....

Art and philosophy converge on this point, the constitution of an earth and a

people which are lacking, as the correlate of creation" (104). This is clearly

not a matter of fabrication: "The people is internal to the thinker because it

is a 'becoming-people,' just as the thinker is internal to the people, as a no

less unlimited becoming. The artist or the philosopher are unable to create

a people, they can only invoke it with all their resources. A people can cre-

ate itself only in abominable sufferings, and cannot occupy itself with art or

philosophy. But the books of philosophy and the works of art also contain in

turn their unimaginable amount of suffering which allows for the presentiment

of the advent of a people. They have in common the fact of resisting, resisting

death, servitude, the intolerable, shame, the present" (105). Qu'est-ce que la

philosophie? closes by evoking the merging of philosophy, art, and science,

as differing modes of encountering and indicating alterity. These are the end-

ing lines: "In this immersion, we could say one draws from chaos the shadow

[I'ombre] of the 'people to come,' as art calls it, but also philosophy, science: the people-mass, people-world, people-brain, people-chaos. Non-thinking

thought that dwells in all three, like the non-conceptual concept of Klee or

the inner silence of Kandinsky. It is here that concepts, sensations, functions

become undecidable, just as philosophy, art, and science become indiscern-

ible, as if they would share the same shadow, which extends across their

different nature and does not cease to accompany them" (223). Deleuze

returns to "the people that is lacking" in various other contexts, among which

are Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Pour une litterature mineure

(Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1975), Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Mille

plateaux (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1980), and Gilles Deleuze, Critique et

clinique (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1993). 70 Ibid.

69 Klee, "Ubersicht und Orientierung," 95. 71 Ibid.

David Farrell Krell Klee and Novalis: Apprentices at SaTs

For Alexander Bilda

Ulrich to Agathe: "But consider an actual work of art: have you never had the feeling

that something in it reminds you of the smell of sparks coming off a knife that's being

sharpened on a grindstone? It's a cosmic, meteoric, lightning-bolt sort of smell, celestially uncanny!"

—Robert Musil 1

A whole range of themes touching the art of Paul Klee occurred to me when I received the generous

invitation to participate in these events—the exhibition, Paul Klee: Philosophical Vision ; From Nature to Art,

and the Boston College conference—and I wanted very much to be sufficiently competent to write on each

of them, but I was not. Allow me to begin by listing some of these attempts that remained mere temptations.

First, I was struck by Klee's use of the words Tupfen and Stricheln to describe his dabbing, splotching,

smudging, stippling, and combing the surfaces of his sketches and paintings—that recurrent roughening of

their texture, as though to make the otherwise severe geometries more livable. Max Ernst's method of frot-

tage may be an important inspiration here, although for Klee it is a matter, according to one art historian,

of "dulling the sharp edges" by means of "accidental side-effects," even "dirty" side-effects. 2 Recall Klee's

own words from his "Creative Credo" of 1918: "The most variegated lines. Spots. Stipples. Surfaces smooth.

Surfaces stippled, combed. Wavy movement. Inhibited, articulated movement. Countermovement. Weft,

tissue. Brickwork, fishscales" (Die verschiedensten Linien. Flecken. Tupfen. Flachen glatt. Flachen getupft,

gestrichelt. Wellenbewegung. Gehemmte, gegliederte Bewegung. Gegenbewegung. Geflecht, Gewebe.

3 Gemauertes, Geschupptes). I thought I might break into the sophisticated and technically demanding world

of art criticism and art history with a learned monograph on Klee entitled Smudges, in German, Kleckse,

or perhaps more keenly, Kleeckse. Naturally, I would categorize and classify the collective smudges of the

corpus, all nine-thousand-plus works. Smudges, by D. F. K., in thirteen volumes. Luckily, I awoke from this

feverish dream.

1 Robert Musil, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, vol. 1 (Berlin: Rowohlt, 1930), 960.

. I life first, 2 Daniel Kupper, Paul Klee (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 201 1 ), 91 am indebted to two commentaries on Klee's and work: Carola Giedion-Welcker, Paul Klee: In Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1961); second, Daniel Kupper's Paul

Klee. I will cite them often, even when it is Klee speaking in his lectures, books, letters, and journal entries. A half-century

separates these two accounts, both published in the popular series of Rowohlts Monographien. Whereas the earlier monograph

tends toward hagiography, the second devotes much of its time to demythologization. Both volumes are valuable, however,

the first more inspiring than the second, the second more analytical than the first. Kupper also cites Klee's writings and letters in

detailed footnotes, and I will cite him especially when he reproduces Klee's Selbstzeugnisse.

3 Paul Klee, "Beitrag fur den Sammelband: 'Schopferische Konfession,"' in Schriften: Rezensionen und Aufsatze, ed. Christian

Geelhaar (Cologne: DuMont, 1976), 1 1 8ff.; Kupper, Paul Klee, 48. 45 ,

certainly knew how to tap the resources of those early anxieties

that we call childlike innocence and simplicity. I thought I might

focus on a single devastating canvas from the year 1939, At the

(fig. its Blue Bush (be/m blauen Busch ) 1), with coded children's

songs and promise of rendezvous, Hanschen klein bleibt allein

and Stell' Dich Ein, with its stilts instead of legs and its impending

removal into the shadowed vale, taleinwarts, all of it in order to

say, as the legs, torso, head, and hair spell it out, with the letters

A, D, E, the South German way to say adieu, ada or ade. Yet

who would have the heart? Not I.

Fourth, I was struck by the terrible illness and death of this

man, himself fascinated by the theme of the mask. Death by a

disease (progressive systemic scleroderma) I had never heard of

and whose cruelty and perversity astonished me. And to think of

the unbelievable productivity of those last years, 1939 above all,

with its average of three finished works per day! Although there

is nothing to laugh about here, or precisely because of that, I

could not help but seek rescue in an imagined scene of a future

Woody Allen film in which the inept and desperate Manhattan

art dealer—played by you-know-who—encourages the artist by

complaining, "Only fourteen masterpieces this week— I hate to

see you letting yourself go like this!" The bad taste of my little

scene is simply an awkward expression of the miracle of those

last years, a miracle in the midst of misery. As the young Klee said

Fig. 1 : Paul Klee ( 1 879- 1 940), At the Blue Bush (be/m b/auen Busch), of Van Gogh, "You will permit me to be terrified" Man erlaube (

1939/801 . Colored paste on paper on cardboard, 26.5 x 21 cm, mir, zu erschrecken). Wilhelm Hack Museum, Ludwigshafen, Inv. Nr. 458/32.

Fifth, but really first, I thought about music—my own little cor-

Second, I thought of writing on Kandinsky's and Klee's medi- ner in the arts—and about Klee's musicianship. How much there

tations on the point, line, and plane as a generative act, and I would be to say, for example, about Klee's 1929 Polyphonic wanted to read these two through the lens of Hegel's early Jena Currents polyphone Stromungen), but all of it so risky, so ( and later Berlin lectures on the philosophy of nature. For Hegel's tenuous, since one hopes to make connections between two physics of point, line, plane, and solid is a physics of space, art forms each of which is a highwire act over an abyss (note

spirit. is [ in time, and motion as an ongoing process of Hegel's a Tightrope Walker Seiltanzer , 1923; plate 20]), as the won- physics for artists and architects, a physics "with wings," a phys- derfully Chaplinesque film, Man on Wire, which Klee, a fan of ics for Klee, especially the Klee who writes, "The only timeless Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times, would have loved. Disaster entity is the most minute, the dead point in itself. When this point awaits every essayed comparison or tentative line of connection becomes movement and line, it demands time, and so it is when between music and visual art, and one winds up sounding like a the line metonymizes to plane, or in the movement from planes to CD booklet, either so technical that no one understands a word 4 spaces." Then, pushing the envelope a bit, I thought I might ask or so schmaltzy that they wish they did not. Klee himself said of his whether the point, which Klee regards as nonmotion, hence as efforts to write of visual art and music together, "Yet no amount of

the nothing, is not black-on-white and not even gray-on-gray, but analysis will succeed" (Doch will keine Analyse gelingen ).

the "gray point" or "gray test"; it would be the colorless all-color Sixth, like everyone else, I have always been struck by Walter that Melville sees in the palsied whiteness of Moby-Dick or of a Benjamin's response to Klee's well-known Angelus Novus of white shark, which is doubtlessly an off-off-white. Gray-on-gray, 1920, which Benjamin purchased in 1921 and which he held on you will remember, is the very color of philosophy for Hegel, to during the various stages of his emigration. Art historians are

and I dreamt of re-reading Hegel's philosophy of history as well anxious nowadays to show the extent to which Benjamin's "use" as his lectures on aesthetics in search of this noncolor, this caput of the painting in his late Philosophical-Political Fragments lacks

mortuum, for Klee the color of pre-beginnings and post-ends, but sufficient foundation in the painting itself. I myself have always

I awoke from that dream too. wondered about the "storm" that blows Benjamin's angel back to

Third, I was struck—as all are struck—by the childlike character the future, the future of continuous human slaughter, a storm that of so much of Klee's prints and paintings. A dangerous topic, this, Benjamin says "is blowing from Paradise." Klee was very con- one that understandably angered the artist himself later in his cerned to show the shadow side of Eden, the very bad weather

life, already in 1924 but especially after 1933, even though he issuing thence that has plagued us all, and from the beginning. I

once gave a paper—in Manhattan—on the storm in Benjamin's text

4 Kupper, Paul Klee, 52. and in Heidegger's rectorship address. That paper upset every , ,

single member of the audience, and I am not going there again.

Seventh, Heidegger's allusion to Klee's well-known Death and Fire ( Tod und Feuerj (1939) in his 1961 lecture, Time and 47 Being, invites us to think the two, Heidegger and Klee, together.

Klee's art seems to have been made for Heidegger's 1935-36

"The Origin of the Work of Art," with its notions of world and earth in strife. Furthermore, Klee's repeated use of the word

Bewegtheit "animatedness" or "movedness," reminds us of the

guiding insight of Heidegger's Being and Time, which argues that human existence is not automotive but is moved by time. Klee spurns vulgar, derivative, clock time as much as Heidegger does.

In the very year that Being and Time was published Klee wrote

to Lily Stumpf, "So let the clocks stop. If I had gotten up today by

5 the clock my mind would still be in bed." Klee's disconcerting

aquarelle of 1933, The Time ( die Zeitj, 1933 being not just any year in Germany, as Derrida used to remind us constantly, and as a number of sketches in the present exhibition demonstrate

(plates 46-54), would be significant both because it reflects a time out of joint and because emblematically it refers to the

uncertain hour of our certain death. When I learned that in 1 956

Heidegger had contemplated delivering a lecture to a group of architects in Freiburg on the theme of "essentializing the acci- Fig. 2: Paul Klee, Blue Flower ( blaue Blume ), 1939/555. Watercolor dental" die Verwesentlichung des Zufalligen the conjunction of and tempera on primed cotton on plywood, 50 x 51 cm, Zentrum Paul ( ), Klee and Heidegger became even more compelling. 6 Klee, Bern, Livia Klee Donation.

Eighth, and finally, one could write an entire essay on the

"cool" and the "warm," if not the "hot," in Klee's thermosensitive gettable professor, Pangloss, who glides his tongue across all art. Recall that for him Titian-red and Raphael-rose showed too things and so smoothes and soothes all the rough edges and much of "the warm tendency," whereas Leonardo's achievement pains of the universe— Pangloss, who, as Voltaire writes, "ensei-

7 depended in part on his "cool tones." Klee prided himself on his gnait la metaphysico-theologo-cosmolonigologie" (see Candide

8 "cool romanticism without pathos" kuhle Romantik ohne Pathos}. Chapter plate It is as though Voltaire had been ( 30, 1912, 57).

At the same time, by contrast, who can fail to feel the heat of the reading Heidegger and Derrida. Second, or so the bibliogra- reds of Pandora's Box as Still Life Die Buchse der Pandora als phies and catalogues of Klee's works assured me, is Friedrich (

Stillebenj (1920) and of Death and Fire, or of the rich earth colors von Hardenberg's, alias Novalis's, Die Lehrlinge zu Sais, The of the Kairouan aquarelles, or of the sun in Ad Marginem (1930), Apprentices at Sal’s. The energetic, even frenetic, Candide prints or the extraordinary reds of Both of Them die Beiden have been much discussed, not so the Novalis prints, even though, ( ) (1930; plate 12)? This topic, the cool and the warm, brings me closer to according to the bibliographies there appeared to be at least my theme, and it is high time. fifty-one of them in a text of many fewer pages than that. In spite

After all this indecision, I was inspired by the fact that of the of their having been listed in the bibliographies and catalogues,

three books Paul Klee illustrated two were among my favorite however, I eventually discovered that in fact Klee never illustrated books of philosophy. First, is Voltaire's Candide, with its unfor- any work by Novalis. As Christa Lichtenstern notes laconically, it

was the publishers of art books, not Klee himself, who selected a

5 Paul Klee, Briefe an die Familie: 1893-1940, ed. Feliz Klee, 2 vols. group of Klee's drawings and matched them up, more or less fit- (Cologne: DuMont, 1979), 2:1059; Kupper, Paul Klee, 96.

tingly, with the pages of Novalis's text. Had time allowed, I would 6 Wolfram Hogrebe, citing Poggeler, Peetz, and Seubold, discusses

Heidegger's unfulfilled plan of 1956. The idea of "essentializing the have scrambled back to one of my earlier temptations. Yet, pres-

accidental" derives from a phrase in Klee's "Schopferische Konfession." sured by deadlines, but mostly out of love for Novalis, I persisted. See Hogrebe, "Paul Klee im asthetischen Muster der Moderne," in Paul All we really know about Klee's relation to Novalis may be Klee in Jena 1924: Der Vortrag, exh. cat. (Gera: Druckhaus Gera, 1999),

78nl2. Hogrebe reflects on the "medial" position of the artist for both to five points: edition of reduced (1 ) Klee possessed an Novalis's

Heidegger and Klee, that is, a position neither active nor passive but works, which, however, shows not a single marginal jotting; reminiscent of the middle voice. The artist cannot fabricate the conditions Klee's letters diaries single to for the success of a work, so that "accident" and "magic," or, thinking with (2) and contain not a reference

Mallarme, un coup c/e c/es, remain key words for him or her. The Zu-fall is Novalis; (3) the sole evidence of Klee's having read Novalis

in fact what Heidegger calls the sending or granting of time and being— it derives from Will Grohmann's report that Klee once told him that is Ereignis. As such, the work of art remains essentially uncanny. According

to Hogrebe, the first poet-philosopher to be prepared for such a situation of he had repeatedly read, with the greatest enthusiasm, Novalis's

uncanny hovering, hovering in the middle, was Friedrich von Hardenberg Flymnen an die Nacht; (4) the only explicit artistic reference by

( 1772- 1 801 ), otherwise known as Novalis. Klee to Novalis is Blue Flower ( blaue Blume (fig. 2) of 1939, 7 Kupper, Paul Klee, 26. )

is 8 Giedion-Welcker, Paul Klee, 70. which, however, a reference not to Die Lehrlinge zu Sal’s but , ]

to Heinrich von Ofterdingen ( die blaue Blume sehn' ich mich zu the Earth and dream of floating in other atmospheres, triumphant erblickenj; as to why the blue flower is grape in color, or what over gravity, then all is lost. Or is he, a mining inspector by profes-

that spiky possum or bear-like figure to the left might be, I am in sion, quite close to the ground? In what way, then, would he melt

the dark; (5) finally, what I believed to be Klee's prints created into the universe? Where is that point of grand circulation? for Novalis's text were in fact selected by what Lichtenstern calls

"inventive" publishers, first in New York in 1 949, some nine years after Klee's death, then later in 1987, forty-seven years after

9 Klee's death, in Zurich and Bern. In his lecture "Ways of Studying Nature" of 1 923, Klee writes:

My disappointment was tempered only by my anger over the "The dialogue with nature remains the conditio sine qua non for fact that the bibliographies and catalogues insist on listing the the artist. The artist is a human being, partaking of that selfsame

11 Novalis illustrations—in reality, works created by Klee for alto- nature, and a fragment of nature in the space of nature." For gether unrelated occasions—alongside the Candide prints. The Klee, the artwork is not a representation of visible items but a fact that these editions of Novalis's Lehrlinge both in English and making-visible of the less than visible, perhaps of the least visible in German, appeared long after Klee's death, along with the elements of Creation. Since the Renaissance, argues Klee, the glaring absence of Novalis's name in the journals and letters, art of painting has refined its optics, but the very emphasis on suggests that Klee in effect had nothing to do with these produc- vision and perspective has caused it to ignore nonoptical impres- tions of the findigen Verleger. sions and notions. Klee does not break altogether from the vis-

Yet both disappointment and anger abated when it occurred ible, except perhaps with his violin, and he spends a great deal to me that what most intrigues me about the Klee-Novalis connec- of time observing the structure and growth of inorganic things tion is the role of pedagogy for both. Novalis (imaginatively) at and living beings alike. Like Goethe, he possesses a large col-

SaTs, and Klee (also quite imaginatively, it has to be said) at the lection of stones, plants, and insects; and like Goethe he studies

Bauhaus. It seems to me that Novalis's Lehrlinge is particularly these things with rapt attention. If a naturalist, then a naturalist germane, whether or not Klee ever illustrated it. And so, at long like Thoreau, intrepid and thorough. A student of Klee's at the last, to begin—after one more obstacle has been cleared. Bauhaus, Christof Hertel, reports:

In his lecture of 1924 "On Modern Art," reprinted in the present catalogue, Klee exhibits his ambivalence toward romanticism. Klee taught us how to see the "articulation"

He writes: and the "structural relations" of vegetable and

animal life. He taught us not merely how to

Such compelling gestures point with special take it in optically, but in his form theory he

clarity into the dimension of style. Here ro- gave us the principles of structuration [Ge-

manticism, in its especially crass and bathetic staltung in general. He showed us the grand

phase, begins to stir. synthesis that embraces all things, the organic

as well as the inorganic. There was nothing he

This gesture wants to repel the Earth utterly, failed to refer to! The same phenomena that

and the next gesture actually elevates itself be- we were accustomed to seeing in the realms

yond the Earth. It elevates itself by the dictate of the biological and the social realms sud-

of forces that hover, triumphant over the forces denly became relevant here in their structura-

of gravity. tion. Everything: zoology, biology, chemistry,

physics, astronomy, literature, typography—all

In the end I let these forces that are inimical to these things contributed to his making it clear

the Earth soar out into the beyond, until they to us, clear in the literal sense, that everything

reach the point of the grand circulation; that we are and do stands and is anchored in hu-

12 way I pass beyond the style of bathos and manity and in the rhythm of the cosmos.

compulsion to the kind of romanticism that

10 melts into the universe. It is this profound involvement in nature that prevents Klee's art

from becoming wholeheartedly "abstract," even if often enough

If Novalis should prove crass and bathetic, if he should repel the titles alone of the canvases, drawings, and prints bind the

works to world and earth and the "things" of nature. Yet, again,

9 See Christa Lichtenstern, "Klee und Beuys im Gesprache mit Novalis," it is less the "things" of nature that fascinate Klee than Delau-

in Paul Klee trifft Joseph Beuys, ed. Tilman Osterwold et al., exh. cat. nay's "rhythms" of natural energies and forces, the cosmic, per-

(Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2000), 101 and 110n7. I was able to locate, in

haps even what Heidegger—to whom I have already alluded a distant Antiquariat, a copy of the second edition of the Novalis/Klee

volume, published that same year, 1987, by Benteli of Bern. In a forward by speaking of "world and earth"—calls (pijaig upsurgence into

to the book the publisher confesses that the venture "may at first be felt to

be overbold" (mag zunachst als Wagnis empfunden werden) (5). The only

word I would object to here is zunachst, "at first." 11 Klee, "Wege des Naturstudiums," in Schriften, 124; Kupper, Paul Klee, 37.

10 Paul Klee, "On Modern Art," (in this volume) 13. 12 Kupper, Paul Klee, 96. , ] , , , ,

the open and withdrawal into concealment and mystery. These the same time on several facets, the pictorial words of philosophical vision are not empty words for one who polyphony, the introduction of repose by way contemplates the leaves of clover. of balanced motion—all these are elevated

There is always something uncanny—unfamiliar, unhomelike— questions of form, determinative for formal about this upsurgence and simultaneous withdrawal, this rhythm wisdom but not yet art in its uppermost sphere.

of all rhythms. In spite of his wonderful Cat and Bird ( Katze und In the uppermost sphere an ultimate mystery

Vogel painting of 1928 and his domestic devotion to his rogu- stands behind the multiplicity of meanings; ) ish cat, Fripouille, the fauna of Klee's canvases tend to be of the here the light of the intellect, lamentably, is

14 more uncanny sort—fish and bugs and microorganisms. Even snuffed.

Franz Marc's monumental and gorgeous blue-flanked horses are too tame for the erstwhile Blue Rider named Klee, and Klee's An anticipation of Novalis occurs especially in the reference to remarks on Marc in his journal of July-August 1916 betray both multiplicity of meanings, Vieldeutigkeit. One thinks of the endless regret over Marc's early and violent death and the distance Klee repetition of the word mannichfaltig "manifold," in Novalis's Leh- feels from Marc's paintings: rlinge zu Sais. We will also not be surprised to find in this same

text that at the highest level of work the intellect is extinguished

The passionate manner of humankind is miss- and something as vague as feeling, Gefuhl has to take over.

ing from my art. I love animals and all crea- Perhaps the most striking anticipation of Novalis— if I may con-

tures, but without that earthly heart's love. I tinue to speak so anachronistically, as though Klee came first— is

am not drawn to them, nor do I elevate them Klee's constant emphasis on the craftsmanship or workmanship

to me. I release myself into the totality [/ch lose of the artist. "Think not about form but about forming," he tells his

mich ins Ganze auf] and stand on brotherly Bauhaus apprentices; think about not the end result, the finished

terms with my next-of-kin, with all my earthly form, but the initial formation. His motto is Vom Vorbildlichen zum

15 neighbors.... Here I am looking for a point Urbildlichenl, "From modeled image to primordial image!"

more remote, a point closer to the origins of Readers of Schelling's Treatise on Human Freedom (1809) will

Creation, where I intimate a kind of formula recognize the word Urbild derived no doubt from Jacob Bohme

for animal, plant, human being, earth, fire, and from the emblematic tradition that meant a great deal to

air, all in is water, and the forces circulation [ alle Klee. The creative force that drives such primal forming the

13 kreisenden Krafte all at the same time. imagination itself: the emblematic tradition loves the principal

German word for imagination especially after Kant, namely, Ein-

Anticipations of Novalis occur especially with these referenc- bildungs-kraft "in-forming-force." Such creative force is mysteries to releasement into the totality and the search for "a kind of ous, and the clue to the mystery, discussed in Klee's The Nature formula," which Novalis called the lingua romana and the loga- of Nature is the unsettling insight that "there never was a mys-

16 rithm. The highest and the lowest things in the universe are related tery that failed to shatter us from top to bottom." Precisely on logarithmically. Finally, the word zugleich, "all at the same time," account of this desired shattering one must proceed with care, as we shall see, is an anticipation of Novalis— if Klee may be said step-by-step, particle-by-particle. One must perform this form- to anticipate the work of a man who lived a century prior to him. ing, guided by the hand, and one must persist—durchhalten! is

Klee's "Creative Credo" brings us closer to the notion of Klee's command—one dare not falter: "Do not lose the creative

Creation, Schopfung and therefore closer to the thinking and momentum" (vom schopferischen Duktus nicht lassen), commands

17 poetizing of Novalis. For whereas we might readily suppose that the teacher. Even if one accepts the warnings of the revisionists,

Novalis represents that "warm" romanticism which Klee sought to the effect that Klee reworked his Tagebucher and aimed all to "cool," we should never underestimate Novalis's capacity to his essays toward a certain "self-stylization," in which the words descry in nature and Creation the shadowy, the chill, the deleteri- creation, cosmos, universe are precisely the main rubrics for the ous and the deathly, about which more in a moment. Meanwhile, cultivated style, coolly and strategically chosen in order to fab- from Klee's "Creative Credo": ricate "The Klee Universe," the notions themselves, in my view,

reflect or radiate a certain heat, a certain warmth, in both artist

Art comports itself to Creation by way of simile and artwork—especially in the artist as teacher.

gleichnisartig It is in at [ ]. each case an exemplar, Klee's pedagogy the Bauhaus from 1921 onward conducts

in the way that the earthly is a cosmic exem- us without fail to Novalis's Sal's. For the origins of the Bauhaus

plar. The emancipation of the elements, their itself go back to the period of German romanticism. The emphasis

being grouped together in composite subdivi- on craftsmanship there, especially in Novalis, though later made

sions, our taking them apart and putting them

back together again in a whole, working at 14 Klee, "Schopferische Konfession," 122; Kupper, Paul Klee, 101. 15 Klee, "On Modern Art, " 14.

16 Paul Klee, Form- und Gestaltungslehre 2: Unendliche Naturgeschichte, ed.

13 Paul Klee, Tagebucher von Paul Klee, 1898- 1918, ed. Felix Klee (Cologne: J urg Spiller (Basel: Schwabe, 1970), 63; Kupper, Paul Klee, 50.

M. DuMont Schauberg, 1957), #1008; Kupper, Paul Klee, 78. 17 Ibid., 67; 50. ]

more famous by Ruskin and Morris of the Arts and Crafts move- teriors and on the exteriors of mountain rang- ment, and continuing in Jugendstil and art nouveau, is perhaps es, in plants, animals, and humans, on panes the key indication of these origins. Another related indication is of glass or pitch that we touch and stroke with the revolutionary change in the theory and practice of pedagogy a fingertip, in iron filings that assemble about in the arts and crafts. Recall Klee's account to Lily Stumpf, in a a magnet, and in all the peculiar conjunctions 20 letter dated January 16, 1921, of the first class he witnesses at the of accident.

Bauhaus, Johannes Itten's extraordinary performance to get his

18 class involved in Matisse's Dance. One thinks back to Novalis's Note the temperature of the passage—cooler than one might

Sal's and ahead to the learning-by-doing methods of Maria have expected or remembered it to be. There is something

Montessori, Jean Piaget, and others. The very notion of appren- even glacial about it: high mountains, snow, freezing ponds tices as young learners survives today wherever the Bauhaus has and panes, iron filings—the language perhaps of an inspector left its mark, whether in Weimar, Dessau, or today's Chicago. For of mines, which is what the Hardenbergs were. The figures and the Lehr- of Lehrlinge refers to teaching, both in the sense of the ciphers of accident, chance, or contingency in nature, die sonder- material taught and the learning itself; the Lehr- of Lehrling sounds baren Conjuncturen des Zufalls, are less tepid pink than icy blue. in our word learn rather than in the word teach, as though teach- Klee, who loved ciphers, whether numbers or letters, would have ing were, as Heidegger once said, letting learn, and the -ling loved Novalis's insistence that the key to the code of this marvel- is a diminutive that suggests youth, incipience. Walter Gropius's ous script of nature, this Wunderschrift, lies nowhere else than in

July 1919 address to the Bauhaus apprentices sounds like an the figures themselves. For the figures, as he says elsewhere, are extended quotation from Novalis's Die Lehrlinge zu Sa'is: engaged in monologue. If the figures are Platonic ei8r|, then they

21 are GCO|4{XTO£i5f|, profiles of embodied things—what Yeats will

No cumbrous intellectual organizations will have called Celtic runes.

come into being, but rather, small, covert, Novalis's text, some thirty-two book-pages in length, com-

self-contained confederations, lodges, guilds, posed during the years 1798-99, shows two parts. The sec-

and secret societies [Verschworungen] desir- ond and far longer part is called "Nature," while the first, only

ing to protect and shape artistically a mystery, four pages long, is called "The Apprentice," in the singular, 22 a kernel of belief— until from out of these indi- Der Lehrling. This follows an early plan for the text, which has

vidual groups a universal, grand, sustainable this singular Lehrling as the title of the entire proposed piece.

spiritual-religious idea will once again solidify, Presumably, one of the apprentices is writing to and for himself

an idea that will have to find its crystalline ex- an account of the teaching he has been receiving, reporting for

pression in a grand collective artwork [Gesa- example how the teacher in his youth "collected stones, flowers,

23 m tkunstwerk].... I am visited by the dream that beetles of all kinds and lined them up in rows of manifold sorts."

here we should try to gather together into a His teacher, affirms the apprentice, saw the interconnections

small community those individuals who exist among things because he "heard, saw, touched, and thought at 24 now in dispersion and utter isolation. If we suc- the same time." Here is one of those instants of the zugleich

19 25 ceed in this, we will have achieved much. that Novalis and Klee share. The apprentice emphasizes, how-

ever, that the teacher does not wish to shape his apprentices in

his own likeness, nor does he expect one apprentice to be like

another, either in terms of their particular interests or the pace of

The first two sentences of Novalis's Lehrlinge zu Sal's sound as their learning. He does not line them up in rows. Each apprentice 26 though Paul Klee, the artist of abstrakte Schrift and Figurenschrift, travels paths "through new lands," each is a "Novalis," since himself could have written them, as though—however virgin his this pseudonym means "discoverer of new lands." edition— he had long been one of the apprentices and had heard According to Schiller's poem, "Das verschleierte Bild zu and learned their language: SaTs," and to all the lore surrounding the goddess Isis at Sal's, no

mortal dare lift her veil and confront her face to face. Thus we

Human beings tread manifold paths. Who- have to try to become immortal, says the apprentice; we have to

ever pursues and compares these paths will try never to stop seeing and sensing. For anyone who for reasons

see marvelous figures taking shape, figures of false piety or prudery refuses even to try to lift that veil "is no

that appear to belong to that magnificently ci-

phered script Chiffernschrift that one espies [ 20 Novalis, Werke, Tagebucher und Briefe Friedrich von Hardenbergs, ed.

everywhere—on wings and on eggshells, in Hans-Joachim Mahl and Richard Samuel, 3 vols. (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1978), 1:201. clouds, snow, crystals, and rock formations, in 21 Plato, Phaedo 83d, 86a. bodies of water at the freezing point, in the in- 22 Novalis, Werke, 1:234.

23 Ibid., 1:202.

24 Ibid.

18 Klee, Briefe, 2:170-71; Kupper, Paul Klee, 90-92. 25 See, for example, Group in Motion ( bewegte Gruppe plate ) (1930; 24). 19 Kupper, Paul Klee, 86. 26 Novalis, Werke, 1:204. 27 proper apprentice at Sai's." the key to nature. She cannot lock the door and hide forever. A

The second part of Novalis's Lehrlinge, entitled "Nature," is dour old man interrupts now, in order to complete the thought;

marked by a wide range of voices, often in dispute, that speak he may hail from Konigsberg, far to the cloudy north. He urges

of the study of nature. The opening voice affirms the importance the apprentices to be chary of their appetites and to study above

of craftsmanship, of the workshop and its tools, Werkzeuge, for all things the narrow ways of inferiority, ethicality, and practical

study of the origin and history of the universe. One thinks of reason.

the craftsman-father of the universe, the Demiourgos of Plato's The apprentice, caught in the crossfire of all these voices, is

Timaeus, but also, at the other end of the history of metaphys- by now in heady confusion. He is rescued, not by some logical

ics, of Heidegger's 1927 lecture course, which analyzes at great calculus, but by a playful fellow apprentice who rushes onto the 28 length the production model of metaphysics. Novalis's plans scene with garlands of roses in his hair, as though his teacher

for Der Lehrling and the text itself emphasize the workshop or were Alcibiades. "Best to be attuned everywhere!" (Das Beste

studio as the site of nature study— it is almost as though, to repeat, ist uberall die Stimmung!) he cries. And in nature mood or attun-

Novalis were citing Gropius or Klee, rather than the other way ement is a matter of love and longing. What our confused appren-

31 around. Novalis, himself a geologist and chemist, a mine inspec- tice needs is "a first kiss." The playful faun is in fact quoting a

tor by inherited profession, respects experimentation and inter- fragment of Novalis from 1798 that reads, "The first kiss. ..is the vention. He is especially drawn to questions of oxidation and principle of philosophy—the origin of a new world—the beginning

combustion, intrigued by the fact that oxygen, essential to life, is of absolute time-reckoning—the completion of an infinitely waxing

ultimately destructive of it: we breathe and burn, or, in the end, bond with the self. Who would not be pleased with a philosophy 32 get rusty. Little wonder that Novalis's "tones" are less warm than whose germ is a first kiss?" The garlanded playmate recounts to

one might expect. To alter the figure, Novalis can fly high and the apprentice the fairy tale of Hyacinth and Rosebud, more an

sing with the all the birds of metaphor, but by profession and allegory than a fairy tale, and very much an allegory concerning

inclination he must also wriggle his way into the Earth's interior. the veil. To make a long tale short, Hyacinth, an overly studious

He knows chill. He knows gray. He knows the dark. Pathology youth, leaves his parents and his darling Rosebud to go off in

and nosology are among the preferred studies of his planned search of the goddess Isis at Sai's. He would lift her veil and gaze

encyclopedia, The Universal Sketchbook. Yet he knows also how on the features that express all knowledge. After countless tribula-

to combine the darker colors so that they too have an irresistible tions he reaches the sacred city on the western Nile delta, where

allure. Novalis's contemporary, Holderlin, translates the name he discovers that the Mother of All Things, the Veiled Virgin of the

Persephone as zornigmitleidig—ein Licht, "furiously compassion- temple, is in fact— his darling Rosebud. Now, that's Stimmung, and

ate—a bright light." Novalis, for his part, has the first voice of his one can find it everywhere, even at home. Presumably, Hyacinth

"Nature" say concerning the mysteries of the underworld, "and thereupon receives from Rosebud his osculatory introduction to who knows into what heavenly mysteries she will then initiate him, philosophy, and, together, they make lots of babies, since, as the 29 she who dwells in the subterranean realm." final line of the fairy tale says, "Back then people could have as 33 However, a nay-saying voice now takes over. Nature is horrif- many children as they wanted." 30 ically wasteful, "a frightful mill of death." Human reason should The two apprentices embrace and leave the lecture hall,

therefore not even try to plumb the depths of nature, for extrava- which the disputants have long since quit, and silence now reigns.

gant and violent nature is a lure and a trap for humankind, which Suddenly all the objects in the collections there—stones, plants,

has a higher spiritual destiny. Nature has the power to devour us, and bugs, all the "myriad natures"—begin to murmur among

and the marvels it shows us are but crumbs fallen from the table themselves. They lament their separation from nature's bosom,

of an ogre, a Titan, a Cronos. for they were abruptly torn away from her. And they express a

Ah, but we can overpower nature with cunning, counters a certain amount of skepticism: "If only human beings could under-

bolder, more Faustian voice. We can subdue it, or her, make her stand the inner music of nature and had a sense for the outer har-

our slave. We are the free ones, the sovereign ones, and we mony.... Will they never learn to feel?... Thinking is but a dream 34 will shackle her with our sciences and engineering and bend her of feeling, a moribund feeling, a pallid gray, enfeebled life."

to our tasks. One can almost hear this voice—in our time, not in The scene shifts now to the broad steps of the temple portico

Novalis's—announcing confidently, "If she vomits forth oil in an and gardens. Travelers have arrived, pilgrims in search of Isis.

inconvenient place, we'll stuff golf balls and rubber tires down Their voices are more harmonious than those of the disputants,

her throat, and thus, surely, we shall prevail." and, as you will hear, Paul Klee speaks with more than one of

A less aggressive voice intervenes, but it maintains the empha- these voices. The first pilgrim speaks of the undivided attention to

sis on human freedom and on the centeredness humanity gained detail that the student of nature must possess. If such undivided

by the Copernican revolution in science: we possess, we are. attention is there,

27 Ibid.

28 Martin Heidegger, Die Grundprobleme der Phanomenologie (Frankfurt: 31 Ibid., 1:214.

Klostermann, 1975). 32 Ibid., 2:330.

29 Novalis, Werke, 1:209-210. 33 Ibid., 1:218.

30 Ibid., 1:210-11. 34 Ibid., 1:218-19. Thoughts soon originate, thoughts or new kinds alchemy, he says. No one will be able to grasp nature, he con-

of perceptions, which appear to be nothing tinues,

other than gentle motions of a coloring crayon

or a pencil rattling away [zarte Bewegungen Who has no organ for nature, no inner imple-

eines farbenden oder Idappern-den Stiffs—you ment [Werkzeug] for reproducing and isolat-

will think I am quoting Klee here, but it is No- ing nature. ..and who fails to mingle with all

valis, I swear it], or wondrous contractions or natural creatures, feeling his way into them,

figurations in a viscous liquid, which, in a mar- as it were, possessing an innate passion for

velous way, are in him. They spread from that reproduction [mit angeborner Zeugungslust ],

point where he made his first impression [von with an intense, manifold affinity for all bod-

c/e m Punkte, wo er den Eindruck fest sfacFt], ies, through the medium of receptivity [Emp-

expanding to all sides with lively animation, findung ].

and they abscond with his ego [und neh men 35 sein Ich m it fort]. The poet's goal is to forge a chain of voluptuosity, Wollust. Luck-

ily, the dour old moralist is well out of hearing range.

This amazing first traveler or pilgrim continues with a reflection The teacher is the last to speak. As evening falls the travelers on the human body that would have delighted Maurice Merleau- ask him what it means to be a teacher at SaTs. What qualities 36 Ponty, who loved Klee's art, and would have delighted Klee must the teacher have? His reply is sober and far from pictur-

too, I believe. The pilgrim says, esque. What is needed from youth on, he says, is relentless disci-

pline for study, along with solitude and taciturnity, Einsamkeit and

Nature stands in an immediate relation to the Stillschweigen. He or she must allow the apprentices to develop

members [G//edma6en] of our body, the mem- independently and at their own pace. Once again the practical,

bers we call the senses. Unknown and myste- craftsman-like training is stressed:

rious relationships of our body enable us to

surmise unknown and mysterious relations in In the workshops of craftsmen and artists, and

nature, so that nature is that wonderful com- there where human beings are in multiple

munity into which our body introduces us.... ways engaged in and struggling with nature

One can readily see that these inner relations [/n vielfaltigem Umgang und Streit], and that

and arrangements of our body must be re- means with farmers, mariners, cattle raisers,

searched above all other things.... The thought ore miners, and many other trades—this is

also strikes us, however, that we must have al- where the development of the sense [for na-

ready had manifold experiences in thinking ture] takes place most readily and most of- 39 before we try to understand the intrinsic nexus ten. 37 of our body.

And what does he or she teach them? Principally, how to choose

A second pilgrim now injects the theme of time into the con- the right materials for the goals the apprentices have set for them- versation, if only because the phrase associated with the veiled selves. Furthermore, the teacher must select that wide range of goddess at SaTs is said to be, "I am what was, is, and shall be." crafts- and trades-folk with whom the apprentices will work. The

This traveler invokes the magnificent simultaneity of nature, das goal? That this vast range of experience in working with nature 38 groBe Zugleich in der Natur. Leaves, buds, blossoms, and fruit will become common property. This is what makes a teacher at are present, past, and future at once, as Goethe demonstrated in SaTs something more than a naturalist or a contingent enthusiast his Metamorphosis of Plants. The second pilgrim uses Holderlin's of nature. And with that Novalis's text closes. favorite word for this simultaneity, namely, die Allgegenwart, "the omnipresent," "ubiquity."

An irrepressible young poet speaks up. His theme is love, lust, and liquid. Water, molten metals, and thinly veiled (or boldly One may well wish to continue the tradition initiated by Max unveiled) sexual secretions are his gods and goddesses. The Huggler, searching among Novalis's thousands of scientific and union of sky and sea, of fire and water, is the object of love's philosophical fragments for material that would have, must have, 40 gripped Klee. That Klee's own edition of Novalis shows no

35 Ibid., 1:220. marginal jottings and quite possibly contains only a fraction of 36 Recall, in Merleau-Ponty's L'oeil et I'esprit (Paris: Gallimard, 1964) the key the material available to us today, restrains neither Huggler nor role played by Klee in the fourth chapter, which is devoted to the mysterious

presence of the invisible in the visible. This would have been the ninth topic

on which I would have wanted to work, and perhaps it would have been

the very best fruit of my indecision. 39 Ibid., 1:232.

37 Novalis, Werke, 1:220-21. 40 Max Huggler, Paul Klee: Die Malerei a/s Blick in den Kosmos (Frauenfeld

38 Ibid., 1:225. und Stuttgart: Huber, 1969), 239-42. —

44 those who follow in his footsteps, and I feel no compunction to tone, and force makes the painter, musician, and mechanician." restrain myself. The truth is that so many expressions in Klee's As for the second theme, sign and image, consider the follow- essays, letters, and diaries are reminiscent of Novalis's scientific ing fragments. Early in the Fichte-Studien Novalis writes, "A closer and philosophical fragments that their relation seems uncannily explanation of the image. / Sign / Theory of signs.... Theory 45 close. of space and time in the image." "The I has a hieroglyphic 46 47 My own selection, no doubt as speculative as any other, force." "The intuited concept is a sign." The fascination with involves five areas of close proximity between Novalis and Klee: letters and numbers—with semiotic systems of all kinds, reminis-

(1) the mix of natural science and poesy, the mathematical and cent of C. S. Peirce and later structuralist thinkers and linguists the metaphorical, the empirical and the transcendental, in both pervades the notebooks from start to finish.

Klee's statements on art and pedagogy and in the romanticism With regard to point, line, and plane, so central to Klee's of Novalis—for such a mix is precisely what Novalis calls the lin- thinking, consider the following fragments. "The I, with its mem- gua romana; (2) the fascination of both for signs, hieroglyphs, bers of form and matter, is the point of empirical consciousness; ciphers, and images; (3) their focus on the procession of point, the pyramid, rising up, is the transcendental. Actually, we always line, plane, pyramid, and sphere; (4) the attention by both to what remain standing in the point.... This point is everywhere in us— others deride as "mere" accident or contingency, des Zufalligen; everywhere where thesis, antithesis and synthesis are, that is, 48 (5) the attraction for both of childlike forms—fable and fairy tale, where we ourselves are." "Thesis and antithesis are the end- 49 dream life, and what Novalis calls "theory of voluptuosity." points of the line. The line is synthesis." And this:

With regard to the first, the melange of natural science and artistic creativity, consider the following from Novalis's 1798 We seek the projection that suits the world—

Vorarbeiten, in which the usual sense of "romantic" is altered: we ourselves are this projection. What are

we? personified omnipotent points. However,

The world must be romanticized. In this way the execution, as an image of the projection,

one will find its original meaning once again. must also be equal to the projection in its free

Romanticizing is nothing other than a qualita- activity and self-relation, and vice versa. Life,

spirit, in tive raising to the powers [ Potenzirung ]. The or the essence of thus consists the en-

lower self is identified with a better self in this gendering bearing and rearing of one's like.

operation. Thus we ourselves are a kind of Thus, only to the extent that a human being

qualitative sequence of powers. This opera- engages in a happy marriage with itself, con-

tion is still altogether unknown. Whenever I stituting a loving family, is it at all capable of

give the common a higher meaning, the usual marriage and family. Act of self-embrace....

a mysterious aspect, the familiar the dignity of

the unknown, the finite an infinite appearance, Love popularizes the personality. It makes

in this way I romanticize it— Opposed to that is individualities communicable and comprehen- 50 the operation for the higher, unknown, mysti- sible. (Amorous understanding.)

cal, infinite— by connecting these matters we find their logarithms—They receive a custom- Concerning the fourth area, the contingent or accidental,

ary expression. Romantic philosophy. Lingua discussed in detail by Wolfram Hogrebe, consider the following

romana. Alternate elevation and degrada- fragments. For Novalis, accident is both catastrophe and happy

41 tion. circumstance—captured in the first place in the figure of Sophie,

his fiancee, who stands for both the gift of love and the disaster of

The reference to logarithms suggests Novalis's pervasive an early death. "Equanimity—even in the face of the most hope-

51 fascination with the mathematical. In his early Fichte-Studien he less accidents. For example, with Sophie." "One does not know writes: "I must discover for myself the elements of mathematical what one is wishing for when one wants to fix the accidental—on 42 52 science." Much later, in the third set of holograph notes for Das the theme of love. / One must let the accidental be accidental."

allgemeine Brouillon , we read: "Geometry is the transcendental "Whenever I believe that little Sophie is around me, and can

art of signs [Ze/chenkunsf]—sculpture. Mechanics—transcendental appear, and if I act in accord with this belief, then she is indeed 43 acoustics, etc." In the final set of holograph notes he writes: around me—and in the end she will surely appear—precisely

"Life is something like colors, tones, and force. The romantic studies life in the the painter, musician, study way and mechanician 44 Ibid., 2:708. color, tone, and force. A painstaking study of life is what makes 45 Ibid., 2:10. 46 Ibid., 2:12. the romantic, just as the painstaking study of color, figuration, 47 Ibid., 2:76.

48 Ibid., 2:41.

49 Ibid., 2:69.

41 Novalis, Werke, 2:334. 50 Vorarbeiten (1798) in ibid., 2:329-30.

42 Ibid., 2:46. 51 Ibid., 2:142.

43 Ibid., 2:673. 52 Ibid., 2:159. )

53 there where I do not surmise it— In me, as my soul perhaps, etc." ern delta of the Nile, and all the way back a millennium or three,

Finally, contingency is what makes every philosophical system but have not given them a chance to lift the veil of the goddess, 54 unsystematic and unsystematizable: that we all may see her face to face, for shame! Where will we find her? In dozens of sketches and paintings no doubt, and in

The properly philosophical system must be various guises. In the present exhibition, examine Klee's Printed

freedom and infinity—or, to express it in a Sheet with Pictures ( Bilderbogen (1937; plate 36), which seems

poignant fashion, systemlessness—brought to- to offer us the goddess together with an apprentice at SaTs,

gether in a system. Only that kind of system an apprentice who stands in fear and trembling, googily-eyed

can avoid the mistakes of the system, in such before her.

a way that neither injustice nor anarchy can

be held against it. The universal system of phi-

losophy must, like time, be one thread along

which one can run through infinite determina-

tions— It must be a system of the most manifold

unity, of infinite expansion, with the compass

of freedom— neither a formal nor a material system—We must search out the dichotomy everywhere. 54

The pedagogical corollary to this is the maxim, embraced by

Klee and Novalis alike, "Practice slowness," Ube dich in der Langsamkeit. 55

To present Novalis's fragments on fable, fairy tale, and dream

would double the length of this essay, already too long. Let two

passages suffice: "A fairy tale is actually like a dream image—

without context—An ensemble of wondrous things and events—for

example, a musical fancy—the harmonious consequences of an 56 Aeolus harp—nature itself." With regard to fancy and fantasy:

"If we had a Fantastic as we have a Logic, then the art of inven- 57 tion would have been—invented."

At the outset I referred to Klee's astonishing productivity

during his final years, the years of his illness. Not long before

Novalis died—of tuberculosis, a month short of his twenty-ninth

birthday—he jotted down a list of things he might do were he to

become ill. Perhaps the following fragment more than any other shows how close Novalis and Klee might have been.

If I were to become ill, then the order of the day

would be: edifying texts, novels, etc —chemical

experiments, drawing—making music, guitar- copying or excerpting passages—cooking,

arranging tables—visiting craftsmen—working

a lathe, carving, etc—arranging cabinets—ob-

serving the illness—acoustical experiments—

description of fossils—observing the weather,

etc.—visits— motion—rest—gymnastics—and (as

with learning languages) patience. 58

Yet if I have brought readers all this way to SaTs, on the west-

53 Ibid., 2:611.

54 Ibid., 2:200-201.

55 Ibid., 2:143.

56 Ibid., 2:696.

57 Ibid., 2:697.

58 Ibid., 2:677-78. Dennis J. Schmidt Paul Klee and the Writing of Life

Human beings take many paths. If one follows and compares them, one sees strange

figures emerge; figures which seem to belong to that great cipher one can find written

everywhere, in wings, eggshells, in clouds, in the snow, in crystals and in rock formations,

upon frozen waters, on the inside and outside of mountains, of plants, of animals, of hu-

man beings, in the lights of heaven, on the scratched slivers of pitch and glass, in the iron

filings gathered around the magnet, and in the peculiar conjunctions of chance. In these

one intuits the key to this magic writing, even a grammar, however this intuition will not let

itself be brought into a fixed form and it seems unwilling to become a higher key.

— Novalis 1

Life has long been identified as a matter of movement; more precisely, life is recognized as that which

has the source of movement in itself. Already we find Aristotle describing the "movement of life" (idvr|GiG

2 tcvo Piod) as one way of characterizing that which philosophy needs to understand . In this task of think-

ing life, philosophers have long and almost universally subscribed to the view that the most appropriate

response to this task—our best means of giving voice and expression to life— is found in language. Philosophy

lives in, and is oriented by, the ^oyot;, by the word. Hegel gives expression to this philosophical commitment

to the word in blunt and unhesitating form when he says, "what is called the unutterable is nothing other than

3 the untrue ." In other words, all that remains apart from language lacks the dignity of truth and so loses the

right to make a claim upon thinking.

But this hegemony of the word in thinking the truth of the being of life has always had significant, even

if largely unquestioned, collateral consequences. Among these is a severe critique of the capacity of the

image to show anything true about the movement of life. Measured against the word, the image falls short

and what it most fails to show is the very key to understanding life— its movement. Plato makes this point clear

in a passage that so sharply condemns the capacity of the image that he even includes the written word-

language that rests upon its translation into a sort of image—in his critique. Plato writes—though in a writing

that seeks to undermine its own written character by miming speech—the following: "Writing [ypa(pf|]...has

this strange quality, and is very much like painting [^ooypaqna]; for the creatures of painting stand there like

living beings [^covxa], but if one asks them a question, they preserve a solemn silence. And so it is with written words; you might think they spoke as if they have intelligence [(ppovoi3vT(x<;], but if you question them...

1 Novalis [Friedrich von Hardenberg], Die Lehrlinge zu Sais, in Schriften, ed. P. Kluckhohn and R. Samuel, vol. 1 (Stuttgart: Kohl- hammer, 1922), 79.

2 Although the questions of "life" and of "nature" cannot be made equivalent, all deep kinships notwithstanding, it needs to be

noted that the same identification of nature, of physis with movement, is decisive. Here, once again, Aristotle is instructive (see his

Physics 2.1 ).

3 G. W. F. Hegel, Phanomenologie des Geistes (Frankfurt: Meiner, 1952), 88. 55 4 they always stand still and say only one and the same thing." In Lyotard, Merleau-Ponty, and Deleuze are just a few of those who other passages Plato will be even more forceful in his condemna- have found a resource and inspiration in Klee's work. There seem tion: writing will be described as "the corpse of a thought" and to be twin reasons for this deep attraction to Klee's work: first, painting will be characterized as (paviaapaia—"phantasms, not one finds—in both his writings and his images—a profound inves- reality." tigation of the relation of words and images, an interrogation of

It is no accident that in the long history of philosophy the their relation and respective possibilities that outstrips so much of image—above all the image that calls attention to itself as an what can be found on this question in the history of philosophy; image, namely, the image in painting— has largely been ignored. second—and again, in both Klee's writings and his images—one

When it is indeed considered by philosophers, painting is invari- finds an uncommon sensitivity to the effort to carry forward, not ably relegated to the margins of what matters, to that philosophi- simply to copy or represent, the real movement of life. cal ghetto called "aesthetics." As a consequence, the very real questions that belong to the effort to think the movement of life, questions about the reach of words and of images to that end, are effaced. In 1924, Klee gave a lecture entitled "On Modern Art" to

There are, of course, exceptions to this rule and there is a commemorate the opening of an exhibition of his works in Jena. tradition in which these questions are discussed, but until Lessing's Klee's lecture begins by speaking about the limitations he faces

1 Laocoon ( 766) those discussions remained quite marginal in the by the fact of having to speak of painting at all, above all to

5 history of philosophy. The most pronounced and important of speak of, and even in front of, his own paintings. He commences those exceptions begins with Kant and develops with increasing by remarking upon the classical philosophical problem of the intensity up through Nietzsche, eventually even coming to define relation of word and image, and ends the lecture by calling atten-

a tradition of contemporary philosophy. Here I am referring to tion to the relation of painting to the movement of life. In short, the notion of a Bildungstrieb or Kunsttrieb, that is the notion that Klee's lecture, which is dedicated to asking what it is that we are life itself, indeed the very movement of life, is most of all dedi- to see in his paintings, stands as a real counter, a real reply, to the cated to giving expression to itself, to leaving traces in the world, long history of the philosophical dismissal of painting. He begins: to inscribing itself wherever it appears. In this tradition a new dignity is granted to works of art and images are found to hold If, in such proximity to my works, which re- profound, even if inexpressible, possibilities. Even dreams and ally should speak their own independent

doodles become worthy of attention, while painting is gradually language, I still seek words, then I feel a little recognized as a highly reflected and reflective form of expres- bit anxious about whether there are sufficient

sion that cannot be dismissed or neglected. Much could be said reasons to do this and about whether I will do about this philosophic tradition, but one interesting and quite it in the right way. telling common denominator defining that tradition is how con-

sistently those working in it in the last one hundred years have For, as much as I feel certain that—as a paint- turned to Paul Klee's work—both his written work and his painter— possess the means of moving others in the I

ings—in order to find some way of understanding and of seeing direction that I am driven, I am just as certain 6 just how the image can disclose something of the being of life. that I feel that the word is not given to me to

7 Adorno, Benjamin, Bataille, Heidegger, Gadamer, Foucault, point out those paths.

This comment is not a platitude that says simply paintinqs

4 Plato, Phaedrus 2766. It is worth noting that the Greek word for "painting"— should "speak" for themselves. It is rather an expression of a sort "^coypa(pia"-really refers to the "writing" (ypacpri) of "life" (tja>v)- This rec-

ognition that painting is to be understood as a kind of writing is crucial of doubled truth, a double bind, namely the deep and ineluc-

to understanding the Greek conception of painting and it is equally what table sense of the need or the summons of language that belongs separates that understanding from subsequent conceptions of painting. In to the image that is simultaneous with the absence of the word. contrast to this view of painting as writing, we refer to these works of art by

making reference to the material out of which they are composed: paint. Klee is acutely aware of the riddle harbored in the question of

5 For the most part this tradition tends to the view that there is a fundamental the relation between word and image. Far from setting it aside sameness to the word and the image so that Horace's comment "ut pictura as has so often been done in the history of philosophy, Klee's poesis" ("as for painting, so too poetry") has the status of something of a

truism. This tradition also finds expression in the notion ekphrasis, that is the

assumption that images "speak." Lessing's analysis of this idea of ekphrasis

in his treatment of Homer's presentation of Achilles's shield in Book Eigh- 7 Paul Klee, "Vortrag Jena" [facsimile reproduction], in Paul Klee in Jena

teen of the Iliad changes the tide of this tradition and begins the process 1924: Der Vortrag, exh. cat. (Gera: Druckhaus Gera, 1999), 49 (my trans-

whereby the depth of these issues is finally broached. On this, see my "Like lation of this work throughout). This text would not be published until 1 945,

a fire that consumes all before it," in Lyrical and Ethical Subjects (Albany: with the lecture thenceforth titled "Uber die moderne Kunst." Most of Klee's

State University of New York Press, 2005), 141 -62. writings were not published until after the war, so the impact of his theoreti-

6 Stephen H. Watson's book, Crescent Moon over the Rational: Philosophi- cal work would not be felt until after his painting had already established cal Interpretations of Paul Klee (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009) him as making original contributions to long-standing philosophical prob-

traces the details of this tradition carefully and insightfully. See also my lems. The one significant exception to this delayed publication is his essay

Between Word and Image: Heidegger, Gadamer, and Klee on Gesture "Schopferische Konfession," which was published in 1920 in conjunction

and Genesis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012). with a quite prominent series of texts entitled Tribune der Kunst und Zeit. works— both written and pictorial—frequently present this enigma

of the relation of the word and the image. One way in which he does this is in the way words enter into his painting. There are 57 two ways in which this clearly happens. First, there are paintings

in which words or letters constitute the image. Second, the title

itself is presented as a part of the painting; for Klee, the words

of the title are never supplemental to the work, but intrinsic to it,

so much so that he said that he did not consider a painting to

be complete until it had gone through the "baptism of the title."

In such instances one sees that there is for Klee a sort of double

life of the word and the image, each crosses into the other even

while remaining itself. So, for instance, the eyes of the person

in To Make Visible ( sichtbar machen) (1926; plate 59) repeat

the letter s in the word "sichtbar." One sees this incorporation

of words in many paintings; among the best-known instances of

this is Klee's late painting Death and Fire ( Tod und Feuerj (1940;

8 fig. 1 in which the T, O, and D constitute features of the image. )

One soon comes to realize that the opening words of this lecture

in 1924 call attention to a very real question about the relation

of words and images driving Klee's work. One can argue, rightly

I believe, that Klee's reflections on this question go far beyond what one finds on this matter in the history of philosophy. Fig. 1: Paul Klee (1879-1940), Death and Fire ( Tod und Feuer), 1940/332. Oil and colored paste on burlap, 46.7 x 44.6 cm, Later in his lecture, Klee will make more precise the difficulty Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern. of speaking about paintings. This is the point at which Klee sur-

passes most philosophical discussions of this issue; it is also the

point at which he begins to link the question of word and image cern ourselves with the parts in their detail....

to the task of thinking the movement of life:

That which the so-called spatial arts have

It is not easy to find one's way in a whole that long achieved, that which even the temporal

is composed of parts which belong to different art of music has achieved with its resounding

dimensions. And nature is just such a whole, precision in polyphony, this phenomenon of a

as is its transformed copy [Ab/7d] art. simultaneous multi-dimensionality which helps

drama reach its climax, is something that we

It is difficult to survey such a totality—whether it unfortunately cannot find in the realm of lin-

is nature or art—and it is even more difficult to guistic didactical expression. Contact with

help another find such a comprehensive view. these dimensions must, in this case, take place

9 externally, after the fact.

This is due to the temporally distinct methods,

which are the only ones available to us, for In short, the complexity of the image, which emerges out of

conveying a clear spatial image [Geb/7cfe], its "multi-dimensional simultaneity," outstrips the capacities of

in such a form of representation [Vorsfe//ung]. language that are wedded to a sequential consequentiality. In

The reason for this is the deficiency of the tem- making this comparison between words and images, Klee will

poral character of language. echo Lessing who spoke of the same compression of painting

and the same extension of the narrative as well. Lessing, like Klee,

With such a means we lack the ability to dis- sees in this the heart of the irreconcilable issues that bind words

cuss a multi-dimensional simultaneity in a syn- and images. But Lessing, unlike Klee, finds in this same differ-

thetic manner. ence the "advantage" of language. Lessing is clear: "And what

are these advantages? The liberty to extend his description over

Despite all of these deficiencies we must con- that which preceded and that which followed the single moment

represented in the painting; and the power of showing not only

what the artist shows, but also that which the artist must leave to 8 One thinks here as well of a painter like Cy Twombly for whom words can 10 constitute the entire image. Like Klee before him, Twombly's work is deeply the imagination." In other words, Lessing—and in this he is quite

inspired by, and dedicated to, the question of the relation of words and im-

ages. So, for instance, one can approach Twombly's ten painting cycle "50

Days at Ilium" as a painterly rejoinder to Lessing's Laocoon. On this, see my 9 Klee, "Vortrag Jena," 52-53.

"Like a fire that consumes all before it," 141 -62. 10 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoon (Stuttgart, 1766), 99. representative of a long-standing philosophical prejudice regard- them are the titles that so frequently refer to musical performance ing painting— understands painting as riveted to, and thus limited or elements of music (see, for instance, plates 37 -40). One sees by, the moment; whereas language stretches itself across time. In allusions to music as well in his lecture notes from the Bauhaus, short, the verb always trumps the image. But in his essay "Creative in which Klee "scores" his thoughts on composition. Klee often

Credo" (1918) Klee makes his opposition to this view quite clear: spoke and wrote of "polyphonic painting" as a way of clarifying

"Movement is the source of all growth. In Lessing's Laocoon, the the simultaneity that can define painting. In a 1917 diary entry subject of so much mental exercise in our younger years, there is he writes, "Simple movement seems banal to us. The element of much ado about the difference between time and space in art. time [as sequence] must be eliminated. Yesterday and tomorrow

Once we examine it more closely, this is really just a bit of erudite as simultaneous. In music, polyphony helped to some extent to hair-splitting for space too implies the concept of time. ..the work satisfy this need.... Polyphonic painting is superior to music in that

11 of art is the record of such movement." Klee's remark takes the in it the time element becomes a spatial element. The notion of

13 traditional distinction between word and image—the temporal dif- simultaneity stands out even more richly." This bond between ference between them—and turns the evaluation of that distinction painting and music for Klee is fundamental and calls to mind on its head. His emphasis on the temporality of the work will point Nietzsche's remark that music gives birth to painting by giving

14 to one of the keys of his own understanding of painting; namely, off "sparks of images." Klee would, I believe, agree, but would that the painting needs to be seen as a movement, not at all as also add that painting, in a like fashion, must be understood as

12 static, not frozen in the moment. Klee understands the painting giving birth to music. But it is not the subject matter or the titles of as the product of a dynamic activity and, insofar as it succeeds, Klee's paintings that serve as the real link between painting and the painting remains a dynamic work. There are many ways in music for him. It is rather in the form, the movement one sees in

15 which Klee's paintings exhibit this dynamic quality. In his lecture the painting, that this temporal link is most deeply expressed. he refers to what he calls the simultaneity of forms or the "multi- In his lecture Klee gives two reasons for this liveliness, this dimensionality" of painting which is found in layering, overlap- movement that defines the heart of painting. The first reason has ping forms, depth, perspective, and other techniques (one sees already been noted: the simultaneity of forms or what Klee calls this in almost all of Klee's paintings, but see plates 11, 15, 20, the "multi-dimensionality" of painting. The second account that

26, 29, 45, 61 for a diverse set of examples). This palimpsest-like he gives of this temporality of painting is more complicated and character of Klee's work is not to be explained simply as a spatial goes to the core of what he says in his lecture. To make this clear, overwriting of images; rather, it is one way that a painting simul- Klee's text itself needs to be cited in more detail. At the outset taneously presents a happening of events that are different. This of the lecture, Klee compares the artist and the tree. The image overwriting of images is, at bottom, a temporal matter. There are he describes opens a new and important perspective on the fre- other ways in which this movement at the heart of painting is pre- quent images of trees and plants—of vegetative life—that one finds sented in Klee's work. One sees this, for instance, in his frequent in Klee's paintings (see, for instance, plates 2, 9, 11, 37): use of arrows or other symbols for movement (see plates 4, 18,

27, 37). But this movement, whether or not it is explicitly depicted I want to compare this many-rooted and ma- as such, belongs to the essence of all painting for Klee. It belongs ny-branched order [of the things of nature and in the relations between colors, shapes, lines, as well as the man- of life] to the rootwork of the tree. ner in which the painting comes to be. To see the painting is to see the movement of life that courses through it. The sap flows to the artist from the root, flow-

In his lecture we find another way in which Klee makes an ing through him and through his eye. effort to unfold the movement defining the painting. He does this when he alludes to a kinship between the "spatial art" of paint- In this sense, he stands in the place of the ing and the "temporal art" of music. Understanding this inherent trunk. proximity uniting music and painting moves to the heart of Klee's understanding of painting and to how it is that we are to see Pressured and moved by the power of this his paintings as a matter of movement. It is not insignificant that flow, he leads his vision further on, into the

Klee was a quite accomplished musician (a violinist) and was work. always surrounded by musicians (his father was a music teacher, his mother a trained singer, and his wife a pianist). References to Just as the crown of the tree unfolds itself tem- music show up in Klee's paintings in a variety of ways, among porally and spatially, becoming visible on all

11 Cited in Will Grohmann, Paul Klee (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1955),

98-99. 13 Paul Klee, The Diaries of Paul Klee, 1898-1918, ed. Felix Klee (Berkeley:

12 Here a text that deserves serious attention should be noted: Maurice Mer- University of California Press, 1964), #1081.

leau-Ponty's Notes c/e cours, 1959-1961, ed. Stephanie Menase (Paris: 14 See, among other places, Die Geburt der Tragodie, in Werke: Kritische

Gallimard, 1996) is remarkable for its efforts to unfold the nature of paint- Gesamtausgabe Vo I. 3.1, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin:

ing in terms of movement. See especially pages 55-64 which are largely De Gruyter, 1972), 49.

devoted to a discussion of Klee. Also notable in this volume are the pages 15 For an extended discussion of music in Klee's work, see Hajo Duchting, Paul

devoted to Heidegger (94- 148). Klee: Painting Music (Munich: Prestel, 2004). sides, so too with the work. great significance since the artist knows that the finished "forms

of appearance" and such "realities" in nature do not come close

It would never occur to anyone to demand to its heart. That heart is first found once one approaches nature's

that the crown of the tree should grow in the "formative powers":

image of its root. Everyone understands that

there cannot be an exact mirroring relation First, he does not attach any compelling signif-

between above and below. It is clear that icance to natural forms of appearance as do

the different functions of different elemental many realist critics. The artist does not feel so

realms must produce lively divergences.... closely tied to these realities because he does

not see these finished forms as the essence of

In the work of art, which has been compared the creative processes of nature. Rather, the

to the crown of the tree, there is a necessary artist places more worth upon the formative

deformation by virtue of entering into the spe- powers, than the resulting forms.

cific dimensions of the pictorial. For in this we

16 find the rebirth of nature . The artist is, perhaps unintentionally, a philoso-

pher. And while, like the optimists he does not

Klee's point is that art should not be understood as copying or hold this world to be the best of all possible

representing nature; rather, if there is a sense in which art "cop- worlds, and while he will also not say that this

ies" or "repeats" nature, then it is in this parallel between the com- world around us is too bad to be taken as an

ing-to-be of the painting and the life of nature as it is witnessed in example, he will nonetheless say:

the growth of the tree that is rooted in the earth and reaches to

17 the heavens . The movement of life that pulses through the tree is In its present shape, this is not the only pos-

the same movement that defines the successful work of art. Both sible world of all worlds.

movements bring into being something new. Both give birth to a world. Once we understand that painting repeats the movement In this way, the artist surveys with a penetrat-

of life at the heart of nature, we can see why art is not the repro- ing gaze the things which nature parades,

duction of nature, but its rebirth. This movement, out of which the formed, before his eyes.

natural world itself emerges and that drives the growth of the tree

and plant, is what the artist needs to repeat and unfold. As such, The deeper he looks, the easier it is for him

18 art furthers life . Klee argues that, more than simply not being to extend his view from today to yesterday. In

a "copy" of natural "realities," when painting takes up nature this way, he is all the more deeply imprinted

into the work there is a "necessary deformation" attending this by the essential image of creation as genesis,

rebirth. Such a deformation of "realities" is not at all a failing rather than by the images of the finished prod-

or failure of art. Quite the contrary, it is the consequence of the ucts of nature.... vital energy that defines art, just as the crown of the tree is the

outgrowth of the vital energy sent forth by the roots of the tree. There, where the central organ of all move-

The real failing of art, if one is to speak of that, is lodged in the ment-temporal and spatial alike—whether it

effort to wed oneself to the "realities" of nature and to insist upon is called the brain or the heart of creation,

their "reproduction" or "representation," rather than letting this activates all functions—who would not want to

deformation take place. But this deformation is not, in the end, of dwell there as an artist? In the womb of na-

ture, in the archaic ground of creation, where

16 Klee, "Vortrag Jena," (emphasis added). Interestingly, will 51-53 Hegel the secret key to all lies kept safe.... use similar language when he speaks of the beauty of art as "spirit that is

born and reborn" (Hegel, Phanomenologie, 14).

17 The view of painting as a representation of nature is, however, the most But our pounding heart drives us down from

entrenched and long-standing conception of painting. One finds it exempli- above, deep down to the archaic. fied already in the ancient world in the story that Pliny tells about a contest

between Zeuxis and Parrhasius to see which one of them was the greater

artist, that is, the contest was to see who could best represent nature. When That which grows up from these drives, what-

Zeuxis unveiled his paintings of grapes they looked so real that birds came ever it is called—be it dream, idea, phantasm— and pecked at them. Zeuxis then asked Parrhasius to draw back the curtain

is to if on his painting only to discover that the curtain was his painting. The com- only be taken with complete seriousness

ment was that Zeuxis fooled the birds, but Parrhasius fooled Zeuxis (Pliny, it is united in a form with the proper means of Naturalis Historia 34.36).

making images [ passenden Bildnerischen Mit- 18 On this, see Walter Benjamin's review of Karl Blossfeldt's book of photographs of plants, Urformen der Natur ("Neues von Blumen," Die literarische teln restlos zur Gestaltung verbindet].

Welt 25 [Nov. 1928]: 7). Benjamin's point that the primal forms of nature

are the same as the primal forms of art nicely echoes Klee's claim in his lec- Then those curiosities become realities, they ture. Interestingly, Blossfeldt's book was Kandinsky's gift to Klee for Klee's

fiftieth birthday (1929). become the realities of art that enlarge life as it typically seems. ible is the life of nature: genesis itself.

Because the realities of art not only more or

less give back (with some feeling) what is

19 seen; they also make secret visions visible. Two points at the outset of this essay need to be brought for-

ward at its close since together these points help call attention

If one wants to say that the painter "copies" or "repeats" to what seems most distinctive about Klee's work. The first point nature, then it is the power of nature to create, to bring into being, concerns Novalis's remark about "the magic writing [that is life the life of nature—not any of the particular results of that life—that itself]. ..[and that] will not let itself be brought into a fixed form is "repeated." In the end, the heart of painting has everything and seems unwilling to become a higher key." The second point to do with this movement of life and little— if anything—to do with concerns the ancient Greek word for painting, ^coypaqna: "the objects. One sees this in Klee's work in several ways: the way writing of life" or "the inscription of life." Klee's work—both his that lines still seem to be in the process of coming together, still en theoretical essays and his painterly work— is best understood as route to something (see plate 14); the way a sort of palimpsest of responsive to the way in which life, which cannot be brought into lines and colors gives the impression of real movement (see plate a fixed form but remains always and ever a movement, leaves

15); and the way there is an instability in the image that keeps it traces of its own genesis, its own birth and becoming. His paint- on the move (see plate 16). ing is always an effort to repeat this movement, this writing that

This distance from a concern with objects and with the vis- is the trace of life itself en route to more of itself, giving birth and ible, this preferred proximity to the life of nature, is the reason dying.

Merleau-Ponty suggested that, for Klee, painting is "the blueprint It has always seemed to me that the pleasure one can take in 20 of a genesis of things." It is not a reproduction of the finished Klee's painting is distinctive. It is not the pleasure of beauty in any products, of the objects, that are the result of that process of gen- traditional sense. It is rather the pleasure that belongs to the feel- esis. Modern art is closer to its own heart, to this "genesis of ing of life coming into being. It is the same fresh pleasure as we things," insofar as it has let go of the lure of representation and take in birth and in witnessing the genesis of things and so being has recognized that this process of genesis emerges more clearly somewhat closer to the heart of creation. in abstraction. One might even say that for Klee the object is something of a distraction in the artwork: the given "reality" at any particular moment is contingent and can (and will) look different at another time. No moment of life is sufficient to capture the real movement of life that is always under way, always being born anew. That is why the essence of the painting cannot be found in what is represented since the finished forms of nature- objects—are not what drive the work of art. What drives the work is not found on the visible surfaces that characterize the finished forms—the objects—of appearance. Gripping though these surfaces may be, fascinating for vision that does not see far, objects are, in the end, a distraction from the deepest and most intense vision that guides the painter:

This being so, the artist should be forgiven if

he regards the present stage of the appearing

world as accidentally fixed temporally and

spatially. He regards it altogether inadequate

in comparison with the depth of his vision and

21 the intensity of what he feels.

Or, as the opening sentence of "Creative Credo" puts it: "art does not repeat the visible, but makes visible"—what it makes vis-

19 Klee, "Vortrag Jena," 64-67.

20 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, L'oeil et I'esprit (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 74. This

sense of the task of painting is far removed from the way in which painters

have long spoken of "still life" (or of "natur morte," "Stillleben").

21 Klee, "Vortrag Jena," 65. Cezanne will make a similar claim when he says

"To paint nature does not mean to copy objects, but to realize impressions

of color," cited in Gunter Seubold, Kunsf o/s Enteignis (Bonn: Bouvier, 1996), 119. Charles W. Haxthausen "Abstract with Memories": Klee / s "Auratic" Pictures

Why must nearly everything appear to me as its own parody?

Why must it seem to me as though almost all, no, all techniques

and conventions of art are today suited only for parody?

—Thomas Mann 1

In 1921 Max Doerner, the renowned authority on painting materials

and techniques, expressed his alarm at what he perceived as a wide-

spread decline in the technical skills of contemporary painters: "Art

has abandoned the sound principles of craftsmanship and is therefore

lacking in a dependable foundation.... Only a complete mastery of the

materials will give that firm foundation on which the artist can develop

an individual style and which will at the same time insure the durability

and permanency of his creations. Craftsmanship must again be made the

2 solid foundation of art. There is no other road to lead us out of chaos."

Doerner's concern was doubtless exacerbated by the experiments of

avant-garde artists like Pablo Picasso, Kurt Schwitters, and others who

made use of newsprint, sawdust, sand, or junk in their works, or painted

on raw linen and even burlap.

Paul Klee's Dummies ( Attrapen fig. had Doerner seen it, ) (1927; 1),

might have seemed a perfect example of the dire results of this "chaos." In

this strange image—three allium-like forms in perspective yet unanchored

in space, framed by what appear to be flat, geometrically patterned cur-

tains—some of the colors seem dampened by old varnish; the fine lines Fig. 1: Paul Klee (1879-1940), Dummies (Attrapen),

appear faded, seemingly due to gradual abrasion, and a delicate web 1927/295. Oil and watercolor on cardboard nailed to frame, of craquelure covers much of the surface. These are features we might 56.5 x 42.5 cm, Collection Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid.

expect to find in a much older painting, and at first encounter they appear

to confirm Doerner's gloomy view of the decline of painterly craft. Yet Klee achieved these effects of dete-

rioration deliberately, through that very "mastery of the materials" that Doerner championed. 3 He created

a work that dramatized its own lack of "durability and permanency," and it did so from the moment it left his

1 Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter (1947; New York: Vintage, 1971 ), 134 (altered translation).

2 Quoted from the foreword to the first German edition (1921 ), Max Doerner, The Materials of the Artist and Their Use in Paint-

ing with Notes on the Techniques of the Old Masters, rev. ed., trans. Eugen Neuhaus (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World,

1949), v-vi (emphasis in original).

3 The craquelure, however, is most likely an unintended result of overpainting before the underlayer was dry—one finds this in a

number of Klee's oil paintings.

61 . )

Three conservators with extensive experience in treating

Klee's works have noted how he combined a conscientiously

acquired practice of sound, traditional painting techniques with

destructive processes such as scratching and abrading the paint-

ing surface, achieving surface effects such as we find in aged,

poorly conserved objects: "The surfaces often appear fragile,

their structure suggests the marks of age. In actuality Klee's paint

layers are usually astonishingly weak in their binding properties,

6 and correspond to the effect of truly worn, weathered surfaces."

This practice of deliberately simulating the effects of time and

physical decay, although limited to a relatively small number of

Klee's works, extends through the 1920s up to at least 1935 and

is concentrated in the years between 1922 and 1927, when he

was teaching at the Bauhaus. We find such effects in Arrival of 7 the Jugglers ( Ankunft der Gaukler (1926), which appears like an incised tablet from which the upper layer has crumbled away

at the and in Tablet of a Young Forest Jungwaldtafel) of edges, (

the same year (fig. 2), where the incised gesso surface appears

stained, scarred, and worn, like an old gravestone, by a long,

gradual process of natural erosion. This was probably one of

the works that the Berlin critic Karl Scheffler had in mind when,

in a critical review of a 1928 solo exhibition, he remarked that

"within his small domain Klee knows how effects are achieved

and he can cook up a concoction of old and new art like no one

else." Certain works—perhaps Scheffler was thinking of Cathedral

( Kathedralej (1924; fig. 3) with its worn, faded appearance and Fig. 2: Paul Klee, Tablet of a Young Forest (Jungwaldtafel), 1 926/208. densely ordered rows of delicately scratched patterns— reminded Oil on muslin grounded with plaster over cardboard, mounted on 8 wood, 36 x 25.5 cm, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart. him of "old materials with indecipherable script." Such pictures

seem to take the effect of age as their theme—a rarity in the art of

9 easel. Since Dummies does not remotely relate to any historical the early twentieth century. style, there could be no mistaking it for an authentic painting from an earlier century. While it appears materially old it is stylistically fenstein (Bern: Stampfli, 2000), 173-203. The authors discuss Klee's tech- new. This discord must have been even more startling when the nical practice as a painter in a well-documented historical context. See also 4 Wolfgang Kersten and Osamu Okuda, Paul Klee: Im Zeichen der Teilung: painting was first exhibited in 1931 Die Geschichte zerschnittener Kunst Paul Klees 1883- 1940, exh. cat. (Stutt- Much has been written on the technical innovations of early gart: Hatje Cantz, 1995). In this work the authors document 122 works that twentieth-century art—collage, photomontage, assemblage, frot- Klee dissected with scissors, from which 270 new works resulted. In contrast to the collages of Picasso, Braque, Ernst, and Schwitters and the photomontage—but little has been said about Klee's technical practice tages of Hoch and Hausmann, Klee was cutting up his own compositions— this artist within larger context. Yet no of his generation experi- not wallpaper, faux bois, newspapers, or labels—and creating new ones out mented so widely with pictorial techniques as did he. Certain of those fragments. 6 Baschlin, llg, and Zeppetella, "Beitrage zur Maltechnik," 202-203. Wolf- cubists, Dadaists, and constructivists may have been more radical gang Kersten and Anne Trembley have characterized Klee's painting tech- in the range of novel materials they introduced into the work of nique as "a provocation of matter," a provocation, they suggest, that delib-

erately undermined the physical stability of the picture. They propose that in art, but Klee was more resourceful in exploring original effects his late works Klee, in his pursuit of pictorial expression, willingly accepted with traditional artists' materials such as oil, gesso, watercolor, the prospect of a rapid decay of the work. See Wolfgang Kersten and Anne chalk, and fabric supports. His originality lay less in his choice Trembley, "Malerei als Provokation der Materie," in Paul Klee: Das Schaf- fen im Todesjahr, ed. Josef Helfenstein and Stefan Frey (Bern: Kunstmuseum of materials than in his manner of working with them, a manner Bern, 1990), 77-90. Responding to this thesis in their essay, Baschlin, llg, in which the hand of the artist is not always readily apparent, in and Zeppetella, drawing on their extensive experience in treating Klee's which the most salient surface effects sometimes seem to be the pictures, concede that Klee did indeed tax the durability of his media to the

5 extreme, yet they endorse Kersten and Trembley's thesis only conditionally. product of time rather than of craft. They conclude, "Klee's practice is shaped more by his acceptance of the

mutability of his media than by a deliberate staging of their material decay

4 See the entry in Josef Helfenstein and Christian Rumelin, eds., Paul Klee: or disintegration" ("Beitrage zur Maltechnik," 202-203). Catalogue Raisonne, 9 vols. (London/New York: Thames and Hudson, 7 Helfenstein and Rumelin, Catalogue Raisonne, 4:495, #4161. 1998-2004), 5:160, #4509. 8 Karl Scheffler, "Paul Klee," Kunst und Kunsfler 26, no. 5 (1928): 321. Both

5 Up to now there has been little in the way of systematic research on of these works were in the exhibition that he reviewed, Paul Klee, at Galerie

Klee's technical practice. The most useful contribution to date is the article Alfred Flechtheim, March-April 1928, cat. nos. 3 and 12.

by Natalie Btischlin, Beatrice llg, and Patrizia Zeppetalla, "Beitrage zur 9 The only other major European artist of Klee's generation to have produced

Maltechnik von Paul Klee," in Paul Klee: Kunst und Karriere; Beitrage des a comparable body of work is Constantin Brancusi during the early years

internationalen Symposiums in Bern, ed. Oskar Batschmann and Josef Hel- of his career. See, for example, his limestone sculpture Wisdom of the Earth ,

Klee's simulation of the

traces of age in modernist works that are playfully 63 offered as relics of some dis-

tant era marks an original

intervention in a centuries-old

discourse on the aesthetics

of age. Although such works

are small in number within his

immense oeuvre, their pointed

embrace of interpictoriality

and intertemporality are para-

digmatic for much of his artistic

production. His art abounds in

fictive artifacts—works that

allude to visual traditions

of many eras and cultures.

It offers perhaps the richest

example within modernism

of how, as Jacques Ranciere

has argued, "the future of art...

incessantly restages the past." 10

Simultaneously looking to the

future and the past, Klee's

Fig. 3: Paul Klee, Cathedral Kathedrale 1924/138. Watercolor and oil glaze on paper, bordered works exemplify the "co-pres- ( ),

ence of heterogeneous tem- in watercolor, on cardboard, secured to wood with plaster, 30.1 x 35.5 cm, The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC. poralities" that Ranciere sees

as distinctive of modernism,

which in his unorthodox view is "first of all a new regime for relat- "great care in achieving the impression of a strongly worn mate-

11 ing to the past." In Klee's art we find a uniquely rich expression rial by artificial soiling of the surface, through deliberately frayed

of that regime. edges. ..as well as by means of seemingly artless application of

paint. The idea of a long used, cherished object suggested a 'car-

pet' to which memories cling." 12 We now know that the effects AGE Glaesemer so evocatively described date from a later rework-

One of the earliest examples of Klee's simulation of the ing. This painting originally bore the title Architektur interieur, was

effects of age is Carpet of Memory ( Teppich der Erinnerung ), oriented ninety degrees to the left and mounted on a stretcher.

dated 1914 by the artist (fig. 4). It is executed in oil on a frayed, Not until 1921 at the earliest, the year in which Klee adopted the

irregular piece of linen grounded with chalk and oil pigment and style of dating we see on the mat, did the work acquire its present

is mounted on cardboard so that its textural identity as fabric is appearance and title. Only then, when he removed the canvas

enhanced. Writing on this work, Jurgen Glaesemer noted Klee's from the stretcher and mounted it on cardboard did those "frayed

edges" come into play, which, with an indispensable assist from

13 the new title, transform the painting into a "carpet of memory." (1908) and his heavily abraded sandstone Dana'ide (c. 1907-09). See In this, its final form, Klee offers Carpet of Memory not as Friedrich Teja Bach, Margit Rowell, and Ann Temkin, Constantin Bran-

cusi, 1876-1957 exh. cat. (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, a representation of a carpet, an object depicted within an illu-

1995), 92-93, 98-99. Yet in Brancusi's case, in contrast to that of Klee, sionistic space, but as a sample, an exemplification—or, rather, a the sculptures' archaizing styles match their aged surface appearance. In- 14 pseudo-exemplification—of a type of artifact. And what seemed deed, when Wisdom of the Earth was first exhibited in Bucharest, one critic

thought it to looked like an archaeological find from some Egyptian desert.

See DoTna Lemny, Constantin Brancusi (Paris: Oxus, 2005), 40. I am grate-

ful to Andana Streng for this reference. 12 Jurgen Glaesemer, Paul Klee: Die farbigen Werke im Kunstmuseum Bern

10 Jacques Ranciere, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: (Bern: Kornfeld, 1976), 34. See also the similar, but more detailed descrip- Continuum, 2004), 24. tion of the work by Andeheinz Mosser, Dos Problem der Bewegung bei Paul

11 Ranciere sees a sequence of three major "artistic regimes" in the West: the Klee (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitatsverlag, 1976), 53-54.

ethical regime, the representative regime, and, beginning in the eighteenth 13 See Osamu Okuda, "Paul Klee: Buchhaltung, Werkbezeichnung und Werk-

century, the aesthetic regime. "The aesthetic regime of the arts is the regime prozess," in Radical Art History: Internationale Anthologie; Subject, O. K.

that strictly identifies art in the singular and frees it from any specific rule, Werckmeister, ed. Wolfgang Kersten, in collaboration with Joan Weinstein

from any hierarchy of the arts, subject matter, and genres.... It simultane- (Zurich: ZIP, 1997), 379-90.

ously establishes the autonomy of art and the identity of its form with the 14 On the difference between representation, or denotation, and exemplifica-

forms that life uses to shape itself" (ibid., 20-26). tion, see Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of the history of art. The ancient Romans produced "weath-

ered" copies of Greek art; in

the Renaissance patina began

to be applied to new sculp-

tures; in the seventeenth cen-

tury paintings were artificially aged by varnish and other

techniques and put in decrepit

frames, often to further the

16 aims of forgers . By the eigh-

teenth century a common view

among art connoisseurs was

that time made a picture more

17 beautiful .

In the nineteenth century

the effect of age was par-

ticularly valued in works of art

and architecture—the British

critic John Ruskin was the most

famous exponent of this aes-

thetic. "Fortunately for man-

Fig. 4: Paul Klee, Carpet of Memory ( Teppich der Erinnerung ), 1914/193. Oil on linen ground with oil and kind," he wrote, "as some coun- chalk, with watercolor border, on cardboard, 37.8 x 49.5 cm, Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern. terbalance to that wretched

love of novelty.. .which espe- clearly to interest Klee here was to evoke, through his title and cially characterizes all vulgar minds, there is set in the deeper the soiled, frayed appearance of the work, that manner of expe- places of the heart such affection for the signs of age that the

." 18 riencing an artifact that is conditioned primarily by the beholder's eye is delighted even by injuries which are the work of time

15 sense of its existence through time . In Carpet of Memory this "The greatest glory of a building is not in its stones, nor in its duration is signified by the marks that have ostensibly accrued gold. Its glory is in its Age, ...it is in the golden stain of time that during the passage of time and through gradual material dete- we are to look for the real light, and color, and preciousness of

." 1 rioration, marks that appear to have taken a toll on the original, architecture He had little to say, however, about the signs of intended appearance of the object. It is these simulated indexical age in paintings, except to praise in them "the golden tone that

." 20 signs, in combination with the title, that evoke an old carpet and time has left And even as he praised the beauty of the traces suggest its fate as an object subject to abrasions from human of age in old buildings, he was sternly critical of those artists who use and the natural law of decay. It is this phenomenon to which made such effects the focus of their painting. This "picturesque-

Klee's title alludes: the contemplation of an old, familiar object ness" Ruskin attacked as "parasitical sublimity," a sublimity "not conjures up memories of its association with persons, events, inherent in the nature of the thing, but caused by something exter- and experiences. Such memories fuse with our perception, and nal to it." It was a "sublimity dependent on the accidents, or on yet they are not something visible that physically clings to the the least essential characters, of the objects to which it belongs." object, they are not woven into its material structure, and they are The "extreme striving" for such effects Ruskin condemned as a

." 21 independent of the intentions of its maker. Although founded on "degradation of art concrete events, they exist only within human subjectivity. Klee's The Austrian art historian Alois Riegl addressed the issue of painting, then, conjures up the kind of experience we can have the modern appreciation of signs of age in buildings and artifacts with objects with a long history—a venerable family possession or an object encountered in a museum. In the former case the mem- 16 On the concept of patina and the history of its appreciation see Thomas ories are personal, in the latter they may be merely the projection Brachert, Patina: Von Nutzen und Nachteil der Restaurierung (Munich: Call- wey, 1985); also see David Lowenthal, "Appreciating the Look of Age," in of viewers as they conjure up the personalities and events "wit- The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, nessed" by this object. Of course in reality Klee's "carpet" has 1985), 148-82. no such history, and we know that. What is thematized here is a 17 On the preference for patinated pictures in the eighteenth century, see Brachert, Patina, 45-48. specific kind of subjective experience and the mood it awakens. 18 John Ruskin, Modern Painters, in The Complete Works of John Ruskin, ed.

The simulation of the traces of age is in itself nothing new in E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols. (London: George Allen, 1903-12),3:319-20.

19 Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, in Complete Works, 8:233-34.

Symbols (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968), 3-95. 20 Ruskin, "The National Gallery," in Complete Works, 12:399.

15 Mosser, Das Problem der Bewegung, 53-54. 21 Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, 8:236-3 7. in a more thorough and systematic fashion, and attempted to itself more compellingly, however, through the

place it within a historical development. His "The Modern Cult of less violent effects—evident more to touch than

Monuments: Its Character and Its Origin," published in 1903 as to sight—of the corrosion of surfaces (patina,

the introduction to the Austrian architectural preservation law, has weathering). ..through which Nature's slow,

22 interesting implications for Klee's practice. Riegl traced the his- but nonetheless certain, inexorable and irre- 28 torical evolution of the values that Western culture had attached sistible work of disintegration manifests itself.

to monuments and historical artifacts, from classical antiquity to

the present. All human works designated as monuments serve Through age value, Riegl claimed, the subjective mood gener- what Riegl called "remembrance value" (Erinnerungswert). In ated by the contemplation of an object was valued over its his-

the course of history this was supplemented by other values, torical significance, for "in the twentieth century we take special

and in defining these Riegl distinguished between "intentional" pleasure in the purely natural cycle of becoming and passing 29 and "unintentional" monuments. The earliest monuments were away." This emergent appreciation of age value, he argued,

intentional monuments, that is, they were intended by those who was a consequence of "the emancipation of the individual in

created them "to keep present and alive in the consciousness of modern times," and his desire to transcend an objective physical 23 30 later generations individual human deeds or fates." Throughout and psychic perception in favor of subjective experience. Such

antiquity and the Middle Ages, according to Riegl, there were no objects, with their signs of disintegration, became, according to

monuments other than intentional monuments. Only in fifteenth- Riegl, nothing more than indispensable catalysts for subjective

century Italy did there emerge a new type of remembrance value, reveries on the "life cycle," on the inevitable process of decay

31 "historical value" ( historischer Wert}. With this there appeared brought on by the passage of time and by natural law.

the category of the unintentional historical monument— uninten- Considering Klee's practice in Carpet of Memory with refer-

tional, because its status as a monument did not depend on the ence to this discourse we can now see that while his composition

intentions of its originators, but on its being valued by later gen- seems clearly to have been inspired by the modern appreciation 24 erations as representing a stage in a historical development. of Alterswert, this age value is manifest in a form that would have

In the course of subsequent centuries the domain of historical been inconceivable to both Ruskin and Riegl. First, this painting,

interest was extended, until by the nineteenth century it included executed in a cubistic style, is patently modern; no one could

"the most remote peoples, separated from one's own nation by ever suppose the signs of age to be genuine. Second, Klee did 25 unbridgeable differences." Yet, wrote Riegl, "if the nineteenth not attempt to imitate the appearance, the pattern, the texture, let

century was the age of historical value, then the twentieth cen- alone the size of a carpet—the composition measures only thirty- 26 tury appears to be that of age value" (Alterswert). According eight by fifty centimeters. The picture, then, is clearly neither old

to Riegl, neither the object's original function nor its historical or nor a carpet. That we do not regard Klee's carpet as an actual

artistic significance were the basis of this value, but merely its carpet distinguishes his work from forgeries of aged artifacts as 27 survival over time and the visible traces of its age. well as from patently new objects, such as meerschaum pipes,

imitation antique furniture, and faded blue jeans in which the vis-

As soon as the individual entity (whether ible effects of age have been simulated. In the latter case, such

formed by humans or created by nature) has objects are after all authentically pipes, chairs, tables, and jeans,

taken shape, the destructive activity of nature however spurious the signs of their temporality.

begins.... Through the traces of this process Klee's painting could be classified as a strange mutation of

one sees that a monument is not of recent Ruskin's "parasitical sublime," for its most salient effect may be

origin but was created at some more or less said to be less a product of its form or composition than of "acci-

distant time in the past, and the age value of dents" of its surface, which evoke a process of decay that would

a monument therefore rests on the obvious have ostensibly begun after its completion. Klee, however, differs

perception of these traces. The most drastic from those painters of the parasitical sublime scorned by Ruskin

example is the. ..ruin.... Age value manifests because he is not concerned with representing the marks of time

in a motif, but simulates them in the material structure of the paint-

ing itself. Yet the painting would be nonetheless "parasitical" 22 Alois Riegl, "Der moderne Denkmalkultus, sein Wesen, seine Entstehung" in Ruskin's sense, since its appearance and aesthetic effect are (1903), in Gesammelte Aufsatze (Vienna: WUV-Universitatsverlag,

1996), 139-84. English translation: "The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its determined primarily by these "external traces of age" rather

Character and Its Origin," trans. Kurt W. Forster and Diane Ghirardo, Op- than by the work's "essential" form. Further, the effect is deliber- positions 25 (Fall 1982): 21-51. All English translations that follow will ately and artfully feigned the artist himself, so that it belongs be my own. See also Lorenz Dittmann, St/7, Symbol, Struktur: Studien zu by Kategorien der Kunstgeschichte (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1967), 45-49; to the very nature of the work and constitutes the basis of a con- Margaret Rose Olin, Forms of Representation in Alois Riegl's Theory of Art scious aesthetic. To speak in Riegl's categories, the age value has (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), 175-80. 23 Riegl, "Der moderne Denkmalkultus," 139.

24 Ibid., 146-47. 28 Ibid., 155.

25 Ibid., 147. 29 Ibid., 156.

26 Ibid., 150. 30 Ibid., 150.

27 Ibid., 144. 31 Ibid., 144. 34 "historical testimony" geschichtliche Zeugenschaft). ( Already some four decades ago, when the reception of

Benjamin had barely begun, his friend Theodor W. Adorno

expressed annoyance at the "obtrusive popularity" of this text,

which in his view was due in part to its regrettable simplifica- 35 tions. What might Adorno say now? Benjamin's aura theory

has grown exponentially more "popular" since then; today writ- 36 ings on it constitute a significant bibliography. I introduce aura

here because I have found this text has special relevance to the

work of Klee—indeed, it was my initial reading of Benjamin's art-

work essay some three decades ago that made me begin to pon- 37 der the implications of the practice that is the topic of this essay.

Usually when the names Klee and Benjamin are linked, it is

almost always with reference to Klee's 1920 watercolor, Angelus

Novus (fig. 5), which Benjamin acquired in 1921 and which

inspired the ninth thesis in his "On the Concept of History," his last

completed text. Yet Klee's importance for Benjamin goes beyond

that. Benjamin esteemed him above all other modern painters;

over more than two decades his name appears in Benjamin's

writings and correspondence more than that of any other visual

artist. There is much to say on this topic that goes well beyond 38 the scope of the present essay. Here my interest is how the writ-

ings of Benjamin around the notion of aura can help to illuminate

the particular experience of temporality to which Klee's art gave Fig. 5: Paul Klee, Angelus Novus, 1920/32. Oil transfer and expression. watercolor on paper on cardboard, 31 .8 x 24.2 cm, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Gift of Fania and Gershom Scholem; John Herring, Marlene and Paul Herring; Jo Carole and Ronald Lauder, B87.994.

become an "art value" Kunstwert a combination whose very ( ),

Walter Benjamin, "The of Art in the of Its Technological Repro- possibility he himself did not consider. For, in his view, the mod- 34 Work Age ducibility (Second Version)," in Selected Writings: Volume 3, 1935- 1938, ern Kunstwollen demanded unity and uniformity, and any sign of ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap 32 transience or decay was disturbing. Press of Harvard University Press, Selected Writings volumes 2002), 103 (

hereafter cited as SW). Original German text: "Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter The age value evoked by Klee's Carpet of Memory has a seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit," in Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte further dimension, one that goes beyond Riegl's concept. As we Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhauser, 7 vols. have seen, for Riegl value was limited to the experience of (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1972-89), 7:353 Gesammelte Schriften volumes age (

hereafter cited as GS). Translation of geschichtliche Zeugenschaft is altered "nature's slow, but nonetheless certain, inexorable, and irresist- to "the historical testimony relating to it"; the translator Jephcott misunder- ible work of disintegration"; the physical decay caused by human stands this phrase as the work's reception throughout history. use had no part in this experience, even if this, too, is equally a 35 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), 82. consequence of the laws of physics and chemistry. 33 The signs 36 The standard work remains Marleen Stoessel, Aura, das vergessene of age that Klee evoked in his painting, however, are those that Menschliche: Zu Sprache und Erfahrung bei Walter Benjamin (Munich: C.

Hanser, also Josef Furnkas, "Aura," in Benjamins Begriffe, ed. result from such use. In this respect, the effect of Klee's Carpet of 1983). See Michael Opitzand Erdmut Wizisla (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2000), 95-145, Memory is closer to the kind of experience that Walter Benjamin with a bibliography that lists most of the noteworthy works on the topic up famously defined with the term "aura" in his essay, "The Work of to 2000.

37 My own first effort in this area was "Zwischen Darstellung und Parodie: Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility." For the expe- Klees 'auratische' Bilder," in Batschmann and Helfenstein, Paul Klee, 9-26. rience of aura as Benjamin described it encompassed not merely A slightly expanded English version, "Between Representation and Parody: the "material duration" (m aterielle Dauer of an object but its Klee's 'Auratic' Pictures," was subsequently published in the Chinese jour- )

nal, The Study of Art History 1, no. 3 (2001 ): 107-145. I have substantially revised that essay for the present publication.

32 Ibid., 155. On "artistic value" Kunstwert which always presupposes his- 38 Among noteworthy scholarly studies of particular aspects of the Benjamin- ( ),

torical value, but is distinct from remembrance value, see 140-43. Kunst- Klee connection are O. K. Werckmeister, "Walter Benjamin, Paul Klee und

wollen is translated variously as "artistic volition," "artistic intention," or der 'Engel der Geschichte,"' in Versuche uber Paul Klee (Frankfurt: Syndi-

"will-to-art." Concise translations do not quite do the trick. I define it as kat, 1981), 98-123; English version: "Walter Benjamin, Paul Klee and the

how a people as a collective entity in a particular place and historical time 'Angel of History,"' Oppositions 25 (Fall 1982): 103- 125; Takaoki Matsui,

wishes to see the world configured, as manifested in their art. Walter Benjamin und die Kunst des Graphischen: Photo-Graphie, Malerei,

33 Riegl deals with the question of use value Gebrauchswert in his essay, Graphik (Berlin: Humboldt-Universitat, 176-210, 350-59; Annie ( ) 2008), but only to the extent that continued use of an object or a building, and the Bourneuf, "Radically Uncolorful Painting: Walter Benjamin and the Problem

necessity of keeping it functional, undermines its age value (ibid., 1 66-70). of Cubism," Grey Room 39 (Spring 2010), 74-93. time: the unique apparition [or semblance] of a distance, how-

"AURA" ever near it may be" (Ein sonderbares Gespinst von Raum und 45 In his earliest extended remarks on aura Benjamin character- Zeit: einmalige Erscheinung einer Feme, so nah sie sein mag).

ized it as something that "undergoes changes. ..with every move- Marleen Stoessel, in her fundamental study of Benjamin's theory 39 ment of the object whose aura it is." The same could be said of aura, has provided a useful elucidation of this cryptic defini-

of his "concept" of aura, for there is no single, clearly defined tion:

concept; his treatment of it, in various texts from the 1930s,

seems ever shifting, marked by "numerous contradictions and The true paradox should have read: "unique 40 inconsistencies." In his first substantive, albeit brief, remarks on apparition of a distance in what is near," a

aura, Benjamin held that "genuine aura appears in all things, non-elliptical and undoubtedly less pointed

not just in certain kinds of things." Its "characteristic feature. ..is sentence, however, might read "unique appa-

ornament, an ornamental halo, in which the object or being is rition of a distance, however close the object

enclosed as in a case. Perhaps nothing gives such a clear idea may be in which it appears." This would make

of aura as Van Gogh's late paintings, in which one could say it clear.. .that the distance can only be the tem-

that aura appears to have been painted together with the vari- poral distance and that something spatial, the

41 ous objects." In his "Little History of Photography," published more or less proximate object, is its only pos- 46 a year-and-a-half later, in October 1931, Benjamin had com- sible empirical reason for appearing.

plicated this notion considerably, arguing that a decay of aura

had begun in the nineteenth century; that modern photographers Precisely this "strange weave of space and time" is found in cer-

had initiated "the emancipation of object from aura," a "peel- tain works by Klee, yet in simulated form. 42 ing away of the object's shell," a "shattering of the aura." Five While Benjamin's photography and artwork essays share the years later, in "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological definition cited above, there are substantive differences between

Reproducibility," he introduced new elements into his character- them in terms of where they locate aura and, in the later text,

ization, as he now focused on the aura of traditional art objects, how it expands the definition with reference to art objects (paint- 43 47 the effect of their reproduction, and on the medium of film. In ing and sculpture) and film. These differences merit examina-

"On Some Motifs in Baudelaire" ( 1 940), the third and last of the tion here, for they are crucial for locating precisely what I am

essays in which Benjamin addressed the issue of aura in depth, calling simulated aura in certain works by Klee. In the earlier

the concept underwent further elaboration and modification, and text Benjamin locates aura in the photographic image, specifi-

the focus shifted away from visual artifacts to the functions of cally in the photographic portrait, which captures the unique his- 44 memory. torical congruence of a nascent bourgeois class with a nascent,

In both the photography and artwork essays Benjamin still primitive visual medium. "There was an aura about them [the

defined "aura" as a "strange weave [Gespmsf] of space and

45 Benjamin, SW 2, 518; SW 3, 104- 105; GS, 2:178; GS, 7:355. The pas-

39 Walter Benjamin, "Hashish, Beginning of March 1930," in Selected Writ- sage, identical in the two original texts (except for the replacement of aus

ings: Volume 2, 1927- 1934, ed. Marcus Paul Bullock and Michael W. Jen- with von in the artwork essay), is given divergent translations in the Harvard

nings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), edition. This passage is omitted in the third version of the essay.

328; GS, 6:581. 46 Stoessel, Aura, 45. In the opening of a manuscript for a lecture on Johann

40 This is the judgment of Stoessel, Aura, 78. As Josef Furnkas writes in his Peter Hebei from 1929, Benjamin, before he had yet written about "aura,"

very useful essay on Benjamin's use of the term: "The concept of aura is offers, without naming it as such, an account of the "strange weave of

nowhere to be found in Benjamin's own writings. All there is are several space and time" that illuminates that elliptical definition. He describes the

remarks, often hard to reconcile with one another, regarding a hardly ob- subjective experience that occurs when reading in a newspaper "a report

jectifiable phenomenon of perception" (Furnkas, "Aura," 103). In a more of a major fire perhaps, or of a murder.... And if you attempted to imag-

recent article, Miriam Hansen concurs on the matter of the term's elusive- ine the event nearer [naher] to you, then undoubtedly, whether you were

ness: "Anything but a clearly delimited, stable concept, aura describes a aware of it or not, you did something very strange. Namely you created a

cluster of meanings and relations that appear in Benjamin's writings in vari- kind of photomontage, in which you unconsciously fused with the place of

ous configurations and not always under its own name." She also seeks to the event—perhaps it happened in Goldap or Tilsit and you are not at all

dissociate the term from "a narrowly aesthetic understanding," which, she familiar with the city—elements from a locale that is familiar to you, ...and

argues, "rests on a reductive reading of Benjamin, even of his famous essay indeed perhaps like your house or your living room in Frankfurt. Your house

'The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility'" (Miriam or living room, which now all at once were transported to Tilsit or Goldap.

Bratu Hansen, "Benjamin's Aura," Critical Inquiry 34 [Winter 2007]: 337, Yet in reality the opposite happened; Tilsit or Goldap were transported to

339). While I accept the wider meaning of the term she outlines in her your living room. And you even went a step further. After you had effected

article, here, with regard to Klee, I am concerned with just such an aesthetic the 'here,' you moved toward realizing the 'now.' The report was perhaps

application. dated September 11th and you read it only on the 15th. Now if you want

41 Benjamin, SW 2, 328. to grasp the story, then you don't transport yourself back four days in time

42 Benjamin, SW 2, 507-530, 518-19 (altered translation). Original Ger- but, on the contrary, you imagine: that is now happening at this momentand

man text, "Kleine Geschichte der Photographie," in GS, 2:368-85. in my living room. In the passing of a moment you have given this abstract,

43 Benjamin, "The Work of Art," 101-133; third version (1939) in Walter arbitrary sensational event a here and now" (Benjamin, GS, 2:635; em-

Benjamin, Selected Writings: Volume 4, 1938-1940, ed. Howard Eiland phasis in original). The compound noun "here and now" will be integral to

and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard Benjamin's description of the experience of aura in both the photography

University Press, 2003), 251-83. Original German text of second ver- and artwork essays. This lecture on Hebei is the only other place it occurs

sion: "Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit," in in his collected writings.

GS, 7:350-84; third version GS, 1 :473-508. 47 See my "Reproduction/Repetition: Walter Benjamin/Carl Einstein," Octo-

44 Benjamin, SW 4, 313-55; GS, 1:607-53. ber, no. 107 (Winter 2004): 47-74, especially 48-54. ,

early portraits], a medium that lent fullness and security to their object play a less significant role in aura than they do in Riegl's gaze even as it penetrated that medium." This aura was associ- Alterswert; patina and other conspicuous traces of age are not 52 ated with the moment of the exposure: "the beholder feels an essential to auratic experience . Although Riegl emphasized the irresistible urge to search such a picture for the tiny spark of con- primacy of subjective experience in age value, that experience tingency, of the here and now [Hier und Jetzt], with which reality was nonetheless triggered by the physical facts of material disin- has (so to speak) seared the subject, to find the inconspicuous tegration. Not so for Benjamin: although he speaks in his artwork spot where in the immediacy of that long-forgotten moment the essay of the aura of the object, of its having an "auratic mode 53 is future nests so eloquently that we, looking back, may rediscover of existence [ auratische Daseinsweise]," at bottom he talk-

." 48 it ing about an experience of the subject. "In a strict sense," writes

Five years later in the artwork essay, the binomial "here and Stoessel, "aura can. ..not possibly be something that appears now" recurs, but it has now been displaced from the image from externally, but only as a content in the mind of the beholder. This a fugitive moment in the past captured by a camera, to the artis seemingly an inner image, that is a memory or vision, that fuses work itself as material artifact. with the external appearance." According to her, this experi-

ence is manifest "only in the relation between a subject and an

." 54 In even the most perfect reproduction one object Although the experience of temporal distance is essen-

thing is lacking: the here and now of the work tial to Benjamin's concept of aura, what is most important is not

of art— its unique existence in a particular the perceptible signs of this distance but the subject's sense of

place. It is this unique existence—and noth- the object's authenticity: "The authenticity of a thing," declared

ing else—that bears the mark of the history to Benjamin, "is the quintessence of all that is transmissible in it from

." 55 which it [the artwork] has been subjected in its origin on, from its material duration to its historical testimony

the course of its existence. This history includes The value we place on the uniqueness of the "authentic" work

changes it has suffered [er/tffen] in its physical of art has, according to Benjamin, its origin in the ritual function— 56 structure over time, as well as any changes in initially magical, then religious—of the oldest works . The "auratic 49 the circumstances of its ownership . mode of existence" of a work of art is most closely linked with

these beginnings in cultic practice, and this cult value attached to

Concomitant with these attributes of aura is another determinant the art object survived as "secularized ritual in the most profane that Benjamin also introduces in the artwork essay: forms of the cult of beauty" that began in the Renaissance. As art

increasingly became the object of a secular cult of beauty, the

The here and now of the original underlies the uniqueness of the cult image was gradually supplanted in the

concept of its authenticity, and on the latter in mind of the beholder by the uniqueness of the artist; the authentic-

turn is founded the idea of a tradition which ity of the object, its status as an original work from the hand of a

has passed the object down as the same, given master, displaced its cult value, but the work nevertheless 57 identical thing to the present day. The whole retained its aura .

sphere of authenticity eludes technological— While studying in Rome as a young man, Klee recorded sev-

and of course not only technological—repro- eral experiences of a kind that, thirty-five years later, Benjamin 50 duction .

52 Benjamin does not explicitly mention patina in the second version of the es- The famous thesis of the artwork essay is that technological repro- say; he introduces it only in an interpolation in the 1939 revision, when he duction and the resulting mass multiplication and dissemination writes: "Chemical analyses of the patina of a bronze can help to establish

its authenticity, just as the proof that a given manuscript of the Middle Ages of reproductions of artworks have led to a decay of their aura: came from an archive of the fifteenth century helps to establish its authentic- in the of the reproducibility of "What withers age technological ity" (Benjamin, SW 4, 253; GS, 1 :476). ." 51 53 Benjamin, 105; GS, 7:55-56. the work of art is the work's aura SW 3,

54 Stoessel, Aura, 25, 46. Or, as another commentator puts it, the auratic ob- In Benjamin's artwork essay the physical changes in the ject becomes "a projection field for the subjectivity of the beholder." Birgit Recki, Aura und Autonomie: zur Subjektivitat der Kunst bei Walter Benjamin und Theodor W. Adorno (Wurzburg: Konigshausen and Neumann, 1988),

48 Benjamin, SW 2, 510, 515- 16; GS, 2:371, 376 (emphasis added). 24.

49 Benjamin, SW 3, 103 (altered translation); GS, 7:352. It is noteworthy 55 Benjamin, SW 3, 103 (altered translation); GS, 7:353.

that some of the major contributors to the scholarship on aura, including 56 As Horst Bredekamp has shown, this aspect of Benjamin's thesis is con-

Stoessel, ignore this important passage, perhaps because within Benjamin's tradicted by the historical facts, and those facts had been established by

discussion of aura it is unique to the artwork essay. Yet it is precisely this pas- art historians long before Benjamin wrote his artwork essay. During the

sage that is the basis for my association of Klee's practice with Benjamin's Middle Ages cult images were duplicated in order to extend their osten-

"aura." Klee's simulated aura is an aura of the artifact, not an aura in and sible powers. If the form of a cult image or a reliquary was reproduced,

of the image, as Benjamin experienced it in Van Gogh's paintings and early then its redemptive or healing power, i.e., its aura, was transferred to the

portrait photography. reproduction. The cult value was therefore not diminished but intensified by

50 Benjamin, SW 3, 103; GS, 7:352 (emphasis added). Benjamin uses the reproduction. Horst Bredekamp, "Der simulierte Benjamin: Mittelalterliche

term "here and now" in one other instance in the artwork essay, when dis- Bemerkungen zu seiner Aktualitat," in Frankfurter Schule und Kunstgeschich-

cussinq the authority, the "aura" of a staqe actor before a live audience te, ed. Andreas Berndt et al. (Berlin: Dietrich Riemer, 1992), 125-33.

(SW 3, 112). 57 Benjamin, SW 4, 272nl2; GS, 1 :481 n8. This note is found only in the third

51 Benjamin, SW 3, 1 03 - 104 (altered translation); GS, 7:352-53. (1939) version of the text. would characterize as auratic, although these experiences were In the 1920s Klee began—though in a spirit vastly different from 62 triggered in Klee's case by the manifest signs of duration. The Lenbach —to simulate "the patina of the centuries" in some of

most notable one involved the bronze sculpture of St. Peter in his own paintings and watercolors, endowing them with the ap-

the eponymous Basilica in Rome, today attributed to Arnolfo di parent material traces of a long "history" at the moment of their

Cambio but at the time still believed to be an early Christian work creation. 58 from the fifth century. Encountering the statue surrounded by Only in the artwork essay did Benjamin explicitly associate

devout pilgrims, Klee was put off by their fervent piety; he could aura with the authenticity of the unique artifact. Moreover, while

not empathize with the enduring ritual function of the work. Yet in in the Baudelaire essay as in the photography text he identi-

its "imperfect stiffness," in striking contrast to the flurry of activity fied aura as investing an object we look at "with the ability to

around it, it seemed to him "like something eternal, while its foot, look back at us," he never characterized traditional artworks in 63 worn down by kisses, appeared on the other hand as a fascinat- this way. It is tempting to speculate whether his introduction 59 ing admission of the temporal." This encounter is exemplary for of authenticity as quintessential to the artwork's aura, integral

Benjamin's concept of aura as "the unique apparition of a dis- to his displacement of aura from image and the objects within tance, however near it may be." The distance, to recall Stoessel's an image (e.g., in Van Gogh's paintings) to the material artifact

gloss, is a temporal distance— Klee, following Burckhardt's itself, was inspired by a controversy on reproduction that took

Cicerone, would have believed it a distance of some fifteen cen- place just as Benjamin himself became interested in the issue of

turies—experienced in something spatially proximate that bore, in technological reproducibility and its implications for the status of

its physical structure, the traces of its long duration as well as of its the original artwork. Beginning in March 1929, the controversy

cult function. Yet, in this case what Benjamin described as sequen- played out over a year in the Hamburg-based journal Der Kreis,

tial historical phases is here synchronically united—namely endur- ignited by an article by Max Sauerlandt, director of the city's 64 ing religious ritual and, for the modern aesthete, the "secularized Museum fur Kunst und Gewerbe. The debate was precisely

ritual. ..of the cult of beauty." Here Klee discovered a source of about the consequences of improved reproduction techniques,

poetic effect, a poetics of the aura. He wrote to his fiancee Lily particularly in facsimiles, for the status of the art object. Some

Stumpf that the pleasure he derived from this work, "with its feet felt a sense of alarm about the devaluation of the original art 60 worn away by kisses," would stay with him a long time. object. A work of art, Sauerlandt insisted, was "at once a palpa-

With regard to Klee's later practice of simulating such auratic bly corporeal and spiritually animate existence," and because

effects, another passage from this same Italian diary is even of the former it obeyed that natural law of all matter, "the law of 65 more striking. It is in an entry in which he recorded his reaction aging." Following Sauerlandt's lead, several authors cited the

to Botticelli's Primavera in the Galleria Antica e Moderna in material duration of the artifact, including what Benjamin would

Florence, in which he responded to what Benjamin would call call "changes. ..in its physical structure," as an essential condi-

the "historical testimony" of the painting's physical condition: tion of its authenticity. Indeed, one of the contributors, Kurt Karl

Eberlein, explicitly associated the time-bound physical aspects

Naturally it surprised me at first, because I

had imagined it falsely, but also in terms of have long known that, except for the diaries of the years 1916-18, his its quality. Partly as a result of its colorlessness diary manuscripts are of a later date, copied and edited after no longer

due to damage. That constitutes the historical extant originals. Many of the entries in Klee's Italian diaries correspond to

passages in the letters to his fiancee Lily Stumpf, and in those cases it seems dimension of this work and is an integral part likely that the views expressed do indeed date from that sojourn. But, inter-

of it. It would be something else again if, like estingly, there is no corresponding passage for this entry in the letters to Lily. [Franz von] Lenbach, one wanted to offer new As Christian Geelhaar convincingly demonstrated, the definitive manuscript of the Italian journal could not have been concluded before 1914-15, at pictures with ruined color. Who knows wheth- least half a decade before Klee began cultivating the look of age in his er, having learned to love the patina of the own works. See Christian Geelhaar, "Journal intime oder Autobiographie?

liber Paul Klees Tagebucher," in Paul Klee: Das Fruhwerk 1883-1 centuries, we would reject the pictures in their 922, ed. Armin Zweite, exh. cat. (Munich: Stadtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, original condition. 61 1979), 251. 62 Franz von Lenbach (1836-1904), one of Munich's "painter-princes,"

58 This is the dating given in the sculpture's brief mention in Jacob Burckhardt's produced pictures that came from his easel already bathed in the golden

Der Cicerone, which Klee used as his guide to the art and architecture brown tonality of Old Master paintings covered with dirty varnish.

of Italy. There is no version of the book in Klee's surviving library, but he 63 Benjamin, SW 4, 338; GS, 1 :646-47.

probably used the eighth revised and expanded edition, published in 64 The essay was a fierce critique of a galvanoplastic facsimile of the Bam-

1900, to which I did not have access. From the seventh (1898) to the tenth berger Reiter, a medieval stone sculpture from Bamberg Cathedral. Max

(1909) edition however, the description remains unchanged. See Jacob Sauerlandt, "Der Bamberger Reiter—gefalschtl," Der Kreis 6, no. 3 (Mar. Burckhardt, with C. von Fabriczy, Der Cicerone: Eine Anleitung zum GenuB 1929): 130-33. The entire controversy, with complete bibliographical

der Ku nstwerke Italiens, ed. Wilhelm von Bode, 7th rev. ed. (Leipzig: E. A. citations, is discussed by Michael Diers, "Kunst und Reproduktion: Der Seemann, 1900), 2:1. Hamburger Faksimile-Streit," Idea: Jahrbuch der Hamburger Kuns thalle 5

59 Letter of Oct. 31, 1901, in Paul Klee, Briefe an die Famiiie: 1893-1940, (1986): 124-37. Benjamin's surviving notes for the artwork essay, incom- - ed. Felix Klee, 2 vols. (Cologne: DuMont, 1979), 1 : 163. A variant is found plete, are published in GS, 1 :982 1 063 and GS, 7:661 -90. They contain

in Paul Klee, Tagebucher 1898-1918 (Textkritische Neuedition ), ed. Wolf- no reference to any of these articles nor, for that matter, any reference to gang Kersten (Stuttgart: Hatie Cantz, 1988), #285. issues of material duration and authenticity.

60 Klee, Briefe, 1:163. 65 Max Sauerlandt, "Original und 'Faksimile-Reproduktion,'" Der Kreis 6,

61 Klee, Tagebucher, #403. Although Klee's diary entry is dated 1902, we no. 9 (Sept. 1929): 501, 502. ,

work has undergone— patina,

weathering Verwitterung the ( ), 70 emergence of pentimenti—with this experience of authenticity

and conceded that for many

modern viewers the pleasures

associated with these qualities,

which were independent of

the artist's intention, took pre-

cedence over the Sinnerlebnis,

the experience of the work's intended meaning. 69

Klee's 1933 watercolor,

Weathered Mosaic verwit- (

tertes Mosaik; fig. 6), so aptly

titled for this context, might well

serve as the perfect illustration

of Panofsky's point. It belongs

to a series of works in this style

that Klee executed following

a visit to Ravenna during the

previous summer. In this work, Fig. 6: Paul Klee, Weathered Mosaic ( verwittertes Mosaik ), 1933/39. Watercolor on Japanese wove paper, mounted on board, 34.5 x 45.4 cm, Norton Simon Museum, The Blue Four Galka Scheyer Collection, evidently with the use of a Pasadena, CA. sponge, he dampened and

partially obscured his brilliant

of the unique artwork with its "mysterious, magical, biological tiles of color, simulating the muted glow of worn, darkened mosa-

'aura'"; merely to attempt to explain why these things cannot be ics in the cool, stony interiors of ancient churches. Significantly,

falsified or reproduced amounted to "an offense against the sov- there is no representation here—there is only the ambiguous sug- 66 ereignty of art." gestion of a cross. This is a perfect illustration of Panofsky's point

The longest contribution was by Erwin Panofsky, then a profes- of how the modern viewer values the Verwitterung as a compo-

sor at Hamburg University. In his article, also issued as a separate nent of the Echtheitserlebnis, over the Sinnerlebnis. It could also

publication, we find ideas that are close to those that figured in serve to illustrate Benjamin's association of the aura with the art- 67 Benjamin's artwork essay. Panofsky writes of the "unrepeatable work's origins in religious ritual. As he wrote, the work's origin in

ritual its if ritual it organic uniqueness [ unwiederholbare organische Einmaligkeit ] religious constitutes part of aura, even the now 70 of an artistic product." Also strikingly close to Benjamin is serves is a profane, purely aesthetic one. It is no longer what

Panofsky's observation that "That which a reproduction, no mat- this object represents, its identity as an image intended to nour-

ter how 'successful,' can never convey, and quite sensibly does ish religious faith, that affects the beholder, but what the object

not in the least wish to convey, is that unanalyzable 'experience has become: a relic of a remote tradition—ancient, mysterious,

],' is ritualistic, like St. of authenticity [ Echtheitserlebnis which a quite irreplace- much the statue of Peter that Klee had seen as

able inqredient...of the aesthetic act that is consummated before a student in Rome. In his artwork essay Benjamin characterized

71 .he original - He fnr.her identified the "natural changes" the the decay of aura as "the prying of the object from its shell"; in

Weathered Mosaic it is this shell that becomes the primary object

of aesthetic experience. Aura becomes content. 66 Kurt Karl Eberlein, "Original und 'Faksimile-Reproduktion,'" Der Kreis 6,

no. 11 (Nov. 1929): 652. An English translation of the essay appears in While the idea of the artwork as a living biological organism

Christopher Phillips, ed., Photography in the Modern Era: European Docu- was a recurring topos in the Hamburg controversy, the other comments and Critical Writings, 1973- 1940 (New York: The Metropolitan Mu- ponent of Benjamin's definition, "changes in the circumstances of seum of Art/Aperture, 1989), 148.

67 Erwin Panofsky, "Original und Faksimilereproduktion," Der Kreis 7, no. 7 its [the artwork's] ownership," or provenance, was not, although

(July 1930): 3-16; English translation, "Original and Facsimile Reproduc- 72 that is certainly implicit in the Echtheitserlebnis. This aspect was, tion," trans. Timothy Grundy, Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics, nos. 57/58 (Spring/Autumn 2010): 330-38. Benjamin had cited the 1923 Panofsky/

Fritz Saxl monograph on Durer's Melencolia I in his Habilitationsschrift, Der

Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels. He also included mention of his Die 69 Ibid., 1087-88.

Perspektive a Is symbolische Form (1924-25) in his notes for the artwork 70 Benjamin, SW 3, 1 05; GS, 7:356.

essay (Benjamin, GS, 1 : 1 049). Panofsky, who had been sent a pre-printing 71 Ibid., 105; 7:355. Here I have substituted the more felicitous translation

of part of Benjamin's book by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, had responded of this passage (Die Entschalung des Gegenstandes aus seiner Hulle) from

negatively to it (GS, 1:910-11). Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn 68 Panofsky, "Original und Faksimilereproduktion," 1080-81. Translations (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 223.

from this article are my own. 72 See note 52. however, prefigured in a text Benjamin published a few months

before his photography essay, namely "Unpacking My Library: A Talk About Collecting." A passage from this essay, which is 71 ignored in most discussions of aura, offers a vivid example of

auratic experience without naming it as such. He speaks of the

"springtide of memories that surges toward any collector as he

contemplates his possessions." He need only take his books in

his hands, Benjamin writes, and "he seems to be seeing through

them into their distant past, as though inspired." "The period, the

region, the craftsmanship, the former ownership—for a true col-

lector, the whole background of an object adds up to a magic 73 encyclopedia whose quintessence is the fate of his object." For

Benjamin it is not the fate of the text, of the reproducible literary

work that he has in mind, but that of the particular, unique copy

of the book that is in his possession, and "the most important fate

of a copy is its encounter with him, with his own collection." For

this reason the true collector will not be content with a bibliophile

reprint of the book. Although the term "aura" appears nowhere

in this essay, what Benjamin describes here is marked by aura's

"strange weave of space and time," by its temporal transparency.

And what he here sums up as the object's "fate" will be identi-

fied with the aura of the unique historical art object in his later

artwork essay.

Both components of Benjamin's characterization of the "here

and now" of the artwork that he identified with aura—the physi-

cal changes produced by the work's duration and the changes

in provenance—are evoked in Klee's Arabian Bride ( arabische

Braut) (1924; fig. 7), executed in watercolor with an oil glaze.

The conspicuous, seemingly "natural" abrasions of its surface

evoke the surface of old, worn vellum rather than betraying the

purposive workings of an artist's hand, and it is these conspicu-

ous qualities that convey the sense that the work is not to be

experienced so much as a representation of an Arabian bride but

primarily as an exemplification of an artifact that represents her; it

is above all the life of the artifact, not her life, that is here conjured

up. Indeed, it is precisely the simulated damage to this mock por-

trait that suggests its estrangement from the matrix of values and

functions that inspired its creation, thereby underlining its sense

of remoteness—geographical, temporal, cultural—and intensifying Fig. 7: Paul Klee, Arabian Bride ( arabische Braut), 1924/151.

the exotic effect of the image. For it is not merely the image—the Watercolor and oil glaze on paper with gouache and ink border, on cardboard, 33.5 x 16.5 cm, Norton Simon Museum, The Blue Four "Arabian bride"—that seems foreign, but the object itself. Galka Scheyer Collection, Pasadena, CA. It is important to note that in this pictorial fiction Klee does

not make any effort to reproduce the style of a particular Islamic

pictorial tradition nor of any European orientalist painting. If the specific moment in linear time. What we have here is a radically

painting evokes anything in Islamic visual culture, apart from the different mode of polytemporality than we find in nineteenth- veiled face, it is the patterning of a carpet, but here that pattern- century historicism or in the neoclassical and neorealist strains of

ing remains asymmetrical. 74 Klee does not quote, adapt, or sug- Klee's contemporaries, such as Picasso or Otto Dix, who evoke

gest a historical style; we cannot associate this image with any the past by means of style or, in Dix's case, through medium as 75 well. In Arabian Bride Klee achieves his polytemporal "auratic"

73 Benjamin, SW 2, 487; GS, 4:388, 389. Several passages in the text are

closely related to the section on "The Collector" (Convolute H) in Walter 75 On Picasso's adaptation of historical styles see Elizabeth Cowling, Picasso:

Benjamin, The Arcac/es Project, ed. and trans. Rolf. Tiedemann (Cambridge, Style and Meaning (London: Phaidon, 2002), 390-451 . For a sharply criti-

MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 203-211. cal view, i.e., that Picasso had sold out "the modernist project," see Rosa-

74 On Klee's relationship to Islamic visual culture see the richly illustrated Mi- lind E. Krauss, The Picasso Papers (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,

chael Baumgartner et al., Auf der Suche nach dem Orient/Paul Klee. Tep- 1998), 89-210. On Dix and tradition see Sylvie Lacocq-Ramond, ed., Otto

pich der Erinnerung, exh. cat. (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2009). Dix et le s maltres anciens, exh. cat. (Colmar: Musee d'Unterlinden, 1996). effect not by stylistic anachronisms but by means of the picture's terion of authenticity ceases to be applied to artistic production, title and its simulated surface effects. This allows him to create the whole social function of art is revolutionized. Instead of being

81 works that are formally innovative even as they conjure up asso- founded on ritual, it is based on a different practice: politics." ciations of pastness, and in this way he achieves a different, more Klee's simulation and staging of auratic effects, then, would complex affect. For it is not only pastness that is being thematized seem to be directly at odds with Benjamin's position in his art- here but a particular aesthetic of reception: the modern encoun- work essay. Indeed, earlier, in his "Little History of Photography" ter, in the age of art history and the museum, with artifacts that Benjamin had attacked the photographers of the late nineteenth exemplify temporal and cultural otherness. century precisely for simulating, through retouching and other

Let us now look more closely at how this relates to Benjamin's techniques, the "auratic" effects of the primitive photographs of 82 notion of aura as he defined it in the artwork essay. In the auratic the 1840s. Klee's art, by its simulation of such auratic effects, work of art, he wrote, "uniqueness and duration" are tightly might be said to encourage that subjective reverie, that purpose-

76 linked. In the auratic experience of an object its "material dura- less aesthetic contemplation which for Benjamin was character- tion" and "historical testimony" become subjectively present to istic of the degeneration of the bourgeoisie in its "asocial behav- the beholder in a single moment; one has a synchronic experi- ior." And indeed, in one of the few mature statements in which ence of its diachronic life, of its layered temporality—"a telescop- Klee spoke of the function of his art, he endorsed such "asocial ing of the past through the present," as Benjamin phrased it in a behavior": "The picture," he told his students at the Dusseldorf

7 note for his Arcades Project. The synchronic experience results Academy, "has no particular purpose. It is a thing without from this uniqueness, from the "here and now" of the artwork and purpose, and it has only one goal, to make us happy. That is

83 our encounter with it in time and space; the diachronic, on the something very different than a connection to external life." In other hand, is our subjective awareness of the work's duration, his contribution to the anthology Creative Credo, published in

"the history" to which it has been subjected, the "changes it has 1920, he characterized art as a "holiday." It transported one suffered in its physical structure over time, as well as any changes into another world, whose diversions strengthened one for "the 84 in the circumstances of its ownership." This auratic experience inevitable return to the grayness of the workday." Klee clearly differs from Riegl's experience of material decay not only, as pre- did not believe in the social agency of modern art. In that respect viously noted, in that it incorporates the history—"The period, the his work seems to embody "pure" art, which, to recall Benjamin's region, the craftsmanship, the former ownership"—but precisely words, "rejects not only every social function but also every 85 through this "strange weave of space and time," of synchronic determination by subject matter." and diachronic. It is this experience that Klee evokes through arti- Yet, ironically, Benjamin singled out Klee's art for what he per- ficial means—artificial, because in his works aura and authenticity ceived as its radical social agency, cheering it as a force for the are no longer identical, as they are for Benjamin; he has isolated destruction of aura and tradition. "One must have seen. ..Klee's the auratic experience from the actual duration, the actual his- Angelus Novus (who preferred to free men by taking from them, tory of the work. Consequently the auratic experience no longer rather than make them happy by giving to them) to understand 86 relates to the actual work, rather the work conjures up memories a humanity that proves itself by destruction." In his fundamental of our experience of genuine objects. essay, "Experience and Poverty" ("Erfahrung und Armut," 1933)

I have thus far refrained from mentioning the crucial fact that Benjamin praised Klee among artists as a harbinger of a "new in the artwork essay Benjamin welcomed, even celebrated, the barbarism." Modernity, with its "tremendous development of ostensible decay of aura effected by the artwork's technologi- technology," had produced a "force field of destructive torrents cal reproducibility, for he linked aura with "traditional concepts— and explosions" and a rupture with the past, with that experi- 78 such as creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery." Once ence Erfahrung that linked one generation with another. This ( ) removed from its original ritual functions, he claimed, the work produced "a poverty of human experience in general," and with of art had been reduced to an object of useless aesthetic contemplation, which, "as the bourgeoisie degenerated, became a 79 81 Ibid., 106; 7:356-57. This reads almost like an ad hominem riposte to Sau- breeding ground for asocial behavior." By destroying an art- erlandt. He had been adamant: "We must say it again and again, that the work's aura through reproduction, one could deploy it for new productive powers of the artwork have died in reproduction" (original emphasis) (Sauerlandt, "Reproduktion," For Benjamin, on the contrary, uses: "the technology of reproduction detaches the reproduced 504).

it was reproduction that restored agency to the artwork. object from the sphere of tradition.... in permitting the repro- And 82 Benjamin, GS, 2:377. duction to reach the recipient in his or her own situation, it actu- 83 Petra Petitpierre, Aus der Malklasse von Paul Klee (Bern: Benteli, 1957), 10.

80 84 Paul Klee, "Beitrag fur den Sammelband 'Schopferische Konfession/" in alizes that which is reproduced." "For the first time in world Schriften: Rezensionen und Aufsatze, ed. Christian Geelhaar (Cologne: Du- history, art technological reproducibility emancipates the work of Mont, 1976), 122. from its parasitic subservience to ritual." And "as soon as the cri- 85 Benjamin, SW 3, 106 (altered translation); GS, 7:356. 86 Benjamin, "Karl Kraus" (1931), in SW 2, 433-58, 456; GS, 2:334-67,

367. For a useful discussion of this essay and Benjamin's interpretation of

76 Benjamin, SW 3, 105 (altered translation); GS, 7:355. Angelus Novus see Beatrice Hanssen, Walter Benjamin's Other History: Of 77 Benjamin, Arcades Project, 471, Convolute N7a, 3. Stones, Animals, Human Beings, and Angels (Berkeley: University of Califor-

1 78 Benjamin, SW 3, 01 ; GS, 7:350. nia Press, 1998), 114-26. See also the magisterial essay by O. K. Werck-

79 Ibid., 119; 7:379. meister, "Walter Benjamin, Paul Klee und der 'Engel der Geschichte,'" in

80 Ibid., 104; 7:353. Versuche uber Paul Klee (Frankfurt: Syndikat, 1981), 98-123. it "a new, positive concept of barbarism. For what does poverty tin ual experimentation in form and technique with a dimension of experience do for the barbarian? It forces him to begin from of memory—and in this way perhaps he is, in the end, closer to scratch; to make a new start." Klee—the sole painter that Benjamin Benjamin than he might appear. For as John McCole has argued, names in the article, allying him with Bertolt Brecht, Adolph Loos, "Benjamin's work celebrates and mourns, by turns, the liquida- and Paul Scheerbart—has modeled himself on the engineer; his tion of tradition." He "draws diverse and often apparently contra- 90 "figures seem to have been designed on the drawing board." "A dictory implications from the aura and its destruction." complex artist like the painter Paul Klee," he continued, "and a Klee may have had a similarly ambivalent view, looking programmatic one like Loos—both reject the traditional, solemn, nostalgically to a vanished past in which painting had a clearly noble image of man, festooned with all the sacrificial offerings defined function even as he relished the seemingly boundless of the past. They turn instead to the naked man of the contempo- freedom for artistic experimentation that modernity afforded, a rary world who lies screaming like a new born babe in the dirty freedom born of art's marginality and social isolation. Already as diapers of the present." Benjamin does not directly mention the a student in Rome, where, as we have seen, Klee had memorable destruction of aura with reference to Klee, but he does so implic- experiences of what Benjamin would call "aura," he sensed a itly by asserting his spiritual kinship with the architectural vision rupture, a severing of the historical continuity between the past of Scheerbart and the buildings of Loos, Le Corbusier, and the and the present. After immersing himself in Roman antiquity and

Bauhaus: "Objects made of glass have no 'aura'.... They have the Renaissance, he confessed that he was "unable to imagine 87 created rooms in which it is hard to leave traces." any artistic relationship to our own time. And to create some-

91 Here Benjamin presented a drastically reductive view of Klee thing anachronistic appears suspect to me." But the real turn- as a radical artist-engineer, somewhat in the mold of a Russian ing point was the war: "Now is the transition between yesterday constructivist, even as, in the last years of the Weimar Republic, and today," Klee wrote in his diary. "In the vast pit of forms lies most favorable German critics were emphasizing the enchanted, rubble, to which one is still partly attached. This provides material 88 dreamlike poetry of his art. One of the skeptics compared him for abstraction." And in the next entry: "Only in my memories do I to Whistler, "a fine and cultivated taste, but also an over-sophis- still linger in that shattered world. As one occasionally reminisces. 89 92 ticated one, somewhat ladylike and fragile." To be sure, one Thus am I 'abstract with memories.'" can see something of the engineer in the rigid constructive style of watercolors like Agricultural Experimental Layout for Late Fall

( Agricultur fur plate Versuchs anlage den Spatherbst ) (1922; 6) PARODY or Polyphonic Architecture polyphone Architektur plate ( ) (1930;

62), which appear to have been drawn mostly with a compass J'ai plus c/e souvenirs que si j'avais milles ans. and ruler. But what of the whimsy, the charm, the play? Poverty 93 of experience? No other artist of his time touches on such a —Charles Baudelaire wealth of experience. Klee combined radical innovation and con-

"Abstract with memories" concisely summarizes Klee's mature

87 Beniamin, SW 2, 731 -36, here 732, 733, 734; GS, 2:213-19, here 215, art, with its radically modernist formal practices deployed in pic- 216, 217. Benjamin was not the only author to interpret Klee as a deeply tures that nevertheless recall humanity's pictorial past. It is to a radical artist. If Benjamin welcomed in Klee the spirit of a "new barbarism,"

Carl Einstein saw his art as a force for a "primitivization" that swept aside brilliant, unjustly overlooked essay by Clement Greenberg that

an "all too sophisticated civilization." "What is now at stake is no longer the we owe this insight: prelude to a destruction of things, but the rebuilding of the structure of the

psyche, whence new figurations bore their way into reality. Art no longer

means unrestrained self expression, it can be something deeper: the suicide The primacy of its formal virtues does not

and the destruction of man as he is in favor of new and possible forma- prevent Klee's art from also being intensely tions" (Carl Einstein, Die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Uwe Fleckner

its 1 Berlin: 1 pictorial— quality that belongs to epiphe- and Thomas Gaehtgens [ 931 ; Fannei und Walz, 996], 268). On a Einstein and Klee see my '"Die erheblichste Personlichkeit unter den deut- nomenal content, as it were, and consists in schen Kunstlern': Einstein uber Klee," in Die visuelle Wende der Moderne: the parodying of "literary" and pictorial art Carl Einstein's Die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Klaus H. Kiefer (Munich:

Wilhelm Fink, 2003), 131-46; Sebastian Zeidler, "Form as Revolt: Carl Einstein's Philosophy of the Real and the Work of Paul Klee," Res: Anthro- 90 John McCole, Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition (Ithaca: pology and Aesthetics, nos. 57/58 (Spring/Autumn 2010): 229-63. Cornell University Press, 1993), 8. 88 For example, Willi Wolfradt, "Paul Klee," Der Cicerone 21, no. 21 91 Klee, Tagebucher, #294 (Nov. 1901). Since Benjamin identified aura with

Ludwig Justi, Von Corinth Bis Klee (Berlin: Julius Bard, an experience of continuity Erfahrung Klee's sense of historical rupture (1929): 619; ( ),

1931), 193-98; Paul Westheim, "Der Holderlin der Malerei," in Helden may seem a contradiction. Yet as Benjamin said of the collector, "Only in

und Abenteurer: Welt und Leben der Kunstler (Berlin: Hermann Reckendorf, the process of extinction is the collector understood" (SW 2, 492 [altered

1931), 224-27. translation]; GS, 4:395). On Klee's developing sense of history during his 89 Karl Scheffler, "Paul Klee," Kunst und Kunstler 28, no. 3 (1929): 112. Rudolf Italian sojourn see my Paul Klee: The Formative Years (New York: Garland, Arnheim, whose Film a/s Kunst (1931) was a major source for Benjamin's 1981), 49-90. artwork essay, mocked Klee's art as Kinderei, child's play. Klee, Arnheim 92 Klee, Tagebucher, #951, #952. O. K. Werckmeister has explored the par-

asserted, enjoyed success on the market because his art satisfied the needs allels between this imagery and Benjamin's interpretation of Klee's Angel us

of a bourgeoisie that, "in coquettish contempt for everything intellectual and Novus in "On the Concept of History" (Werckmeister, "Walter Benjamin,"

problematic," found in it an antidote to "the horrors" of the times. Rudolf 98-104).

Arnheim, "Klee fur Kinder," Die Weltbuhne 26, no. 5 (Jan. 26, 1930): 171, 93 Charles Baudelaire, "Spleen 2," in Les Fleurs du mal (Paris: Poulet-Malassis, 173. 1857). And among the layers, Greenberg might have added, is a paro-

dy of the very traces of the pastness of the artwork, of its survival

through history, evoking the beholder's subjective response be-

fore such an object.

Inscription ( Inschrift }, a watercolor of 1926 (fig. 8), is a rich example of such an auratic encounter and demonstrates the

breadth of the "pictorial" targets to which Greenberg refers—

in this case script. We are presented with a parody of some

ancient, indecipherable textual fragment, in which Klee, with his

delicately mottled brownish washes, has simulated the effect of

aged paper, complete with foxing that speckles its surface. The

inscription remains mysterious, indecipherable, incomprehen-

sible. It is thus not what the inscription signifies, related to the

manuscript's original function and the intention of its ostensible

maker, that constitutes its interest for the beholder. What attracts

us is the sheet's afterlife, its survival through history, its status as a

mysterious object estranged from its original meaning and func-

tion through which it becomes an object of aesthetic contempla-

tion. It is that experience that is thematized here. As in the later

Weathered Mosaic, aura trumps meaning. All of this, of course,

is a fiction, for the watercolor has no such history, and the viewer

knows it. But as with Weathered Mosaic and Arabian Bride, the

work conjures up a subjective mood in the beholder such as

we might experience in the presence of authentic artifacts from

remote cultures.

In effecting such responses in the beholder, Klee reproduces—

more precisely, he simulates—an important feature of modern aes-

thetic experience, one that has its primary locus in the museum.

For these works exemplify not merely physical duration but cul- -M1.& X7 tural transience and otherness; they evoke our experience of

works of art that— removed from their original sites, estranged Fig. 8: Paul Klee, Inscription Inschrift 1926/17. Watercolor and ( ), from their original functions and their concomitant codes and ritu- ink on paper mounted on cardboard, 31 .1 x 14.6 cm, Solomon R. 95 als—lead an afterlife as merely aesthetic objects. Guggenheim Museum, NY. Until recently parody has been widely understood as a genre

in which one work mockingly imitates another work. Thanks to

in general. No longer taking the pictorial for the work of Linda Hutcheon and Margaret Rose we have gained 96 granted but seeing it as one cultural conven- a broader, more flexible understanding of this form. Recalling

tion among others, Klee isolates its distinguish- the original Greek meaning of the word, Rose treats parody as

ing properties in order to burlesque them....

The pictorial in Klee's notion of it comprises John O'Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 12-13. every system of making marks on a surface 95 The Klee admirer Carl Einstein eloquently described the fate of such ob-

that mankind has ever used for the purpose jects: "An altarpiece, a portrait are executed for a specific purpose, for specific surroundings; removed from that milieu the work is only a dead of communication: ideographs, diagrams, hi- fragment, ripped from the soil; just as if one broke a mullion out of a window

eroglyphs, alphabets, handwriting, blueprints, or a capital from a column—probably the building itself was already in ruins. And yet one aspect of the object now becomes isolated: the aesthetic phe- musical notation, charts, maps, tables, etc., nomenon—from that very moment the effect of the art object is constrained etc. All these he includes in his parody. And and falsified. The altar panel is dead without prayer; weak natures attempt,

then more, much more. For the parody of the in their suave aestheticism, to conjure from it some kind of vague religiosity:

a poetic mood is supposed to supplant the great, specific, vital condition pictorial is but a core around which he wraps of the work's origins" (Carl Einstein, "Das Berliner Volkerkunde-Museum: layer on layer of parody that aims at all a AnlaBlich der Neuordnung," in Werke, Band 2, 1919- 1928, ed. Hermann

commonly held verities, all current sentiments, Haarmann and Klaus Siebenhaar [Berlin: Fannei and Walz, 1996], 446). 96 Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century messages, attitudes, convictions, methods, Art Forms, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000); Margaret 94 procedures, formalities, etc., etc. A. Rose, Parody: Ancient, Modern, and Post-Modern (Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press, 1993). Rose has subsequently studied the forms of

visual parody in her Pictorial Irony, Parody, and Pastiche: Comic Interpicto-

in in ). 94 Clement Greenberg, "An Essay on Paul Klee" (1950), The Collected riality the Arts of the 19th and 20th Centuries (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 201 1

Essays and Criticism, Volume 3: Affirmations and Refusals, J950-56, ed. She does not consider Klee in this study. ,

a special form of imitation. IlapcpSo^ (parodos) is the name one term. As Richard Brilliant concisely defined it, "portraits are art

gave to a singer who imitated another; 7iapcp8f) (parode) was works intentionally made of living or once living people by art-

97 103 a song sung in imitation of another song. If one is true to this ists"; Klee's "sitters" however, are entirely fictive. We find the

original sense of the word, parody need not be marked by a same thing in many of his "landscapes," abstract compositions to 98 spirit of mockery toward its object, as it is usually understood. which a fictive proper name or initials are attached to give them

According to Rose, it is not mockery or ridicule but humor that the specificity of an actual site: The L-Platz under Construction

104 is essential to parody, alonq with the element of metafiction or [Der L-Platz im Bau; 1923), Clouds over BOR ( Gewolk uber

"double coding," namely the imitation of codes and conventions BOR; 1928), 105 and N. H. D (Province En-Aitch-Dee) (N. H. D.

of another work of art. To be sure, parody may be motivated by [provinz enhade]) (1932; plate 64) are examples. The major-

scorn, but it may also spring from an attitude of sympathy, even ity of Klee's figurative works are representations—more precisely,

of admiration for the parodied original. Hutcheon proposes that exemplifications—of representations; they only play at being the

at times parody may be "less an aggressive than a conciliatory pictures which their titles claim them to be. Seen in this way, much 99 rhetorical strategy." Greenberg would have agreed. For him, of Klee's oeuvre becomes a grand, but humorous, sometimes

Klee's parody is never bitter, never subversive. "Far from being scurrilous, retrospective of all the historical functions of paint-

a protest against the world as it is, his art is an attempt to make ing: hieroglyphs, cult images, saints, gods, images, landscapes,

himself more comfortable in it; first he rejects it, then, when it has still lifes—all genres and functions are represented, in the gen- 100 been rendered harmless by negation, he takes it fondly back." eral spirit of parody that Greenberg first identified. Here, too,

Visual parody is almost exclusively understood as targeting although there may be no simulation of the traces of age, there

101 a specific artwork or artist. Klee's practice differs in that its is an auratic dimension. Referring to speech acts, Mikhail Bakhtin

object is almost never a specific work or style but, in the examples argued that every human utterance has diachronic as well as we have been looking at, a generic type of artifact and, in some synchronic dimensions; words may have no memory, but types of

cases, a traditional pictorial genre. To be sure, the number of utterance do: "each utterance is filled with echoes and reverbera-

Klee's "auratic" parodies is comparatively small— I have identi- tions of other utterances" of its genre, and "always responds to a

fied approximately one hundred—relative to his vast oeuvre of greater or lesser degree to them." "A genre lives in the present,"

106 over nine thousand works. Yet, if one uses Margaret Rose's two writes Bakhtin, "but always remembers its past, its beginnings."

criteria, of humor and double coding, much of Klee's art can be This is no less true of the genres of visual art, and of the parodied

classified as parody. As with his "auratic" pictures, Klee's land- genre as well.

scapes, portraits, and still lifes are usually no more than parodies Klee's practice in all of his parodies can perhaps be under-

of such subjects, pictures that awaken our memories of other, stood as his response to a historical situation in which the tradi-

genuine examples of these genres. Most of Klee's "portraits," tional representational functions of painting had, as his Bauhaus

for example, are not really portraits at all, but freely invented, colleague Laszlo Moholy-Nagy declared, been rendered obso-

107 strongly physiognomic configurations that parody the conven- lete by the newer, rapidly expanding medium of photography.

102 tions of portraiture. There are two hundred works of this kind, in For the practice of representation was historically linked to cer- various media, that either include the word Bildnis, "portrait," in tain social and religious functions of painting, indeed these func-

their titles and/or have proper names or initials attached to them, tions demanded representation; where these functions were no

that yet are not portraits at all as we normally understand that longer operative, pictorial representation itself had lost its pur-

pose. Accordingly, Klee's art is ultimately not only a parody of

genres but also of the representational function of painting itself. 97 Rose, Parody, 7-8. Rose's etymological discussion is indebted to an article

by Fred W. Householder, Jr., "TTAPfilAIA," Classical Philology 39, no. 1 He inscribes representation within abstraction, and in so doing

(Jan. 1944): 1 -9. The use of the term in music, for example with reference inscribes the past of painting into a modernist, abstract, non- to the compositional practice of J. S. Bach and G. F. Handel, who used their in own previously composed music to set texts for which it was not originally mimetic present—not the sense of a continuation of tradition

intended, is closer to the positive associations of the original Greek mean- but rather as a recollection of it. As such it fits Linda Hutcheon's ing. Bach's Mass in B Minor and his Christmas Oratorio, which consist of concise formulation of the work of parody, namely, "that by its many numbers adapted from music previously written for his sacred or secu-

lar cantatas, offer abundant examples of this practice. See Malcolm Boyd, very double structure, [it] is very much an inscription of the past in

Bach (London: J. M. Dent, 1983), 163-72. the present, and it is for this reason that it can be said to embody 98 Rose, Parody, 45-46.

99 Hutcheon, Parody, xiv. 100 Greenberg, "Paul Klee," 13.

101 This is how Margaret Rose treats it in her Pictorial Irony, 5-51. 103 Richard Brilliant, Portraiture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,

102 There is a rich variety of examples; here I mention only a few: Baroque 1991), 8.

Portrait ( Barockbildnis 1920); Portrait of an Expressionist ( Bildnis eines Ex- 104 Helfenstein and Rumelin, Catalogue Raisonne, 4:40, #3104; col. illus., 61.

pressionisten, 1922); Berta (1924); Mrs. P. in the South (Frau P. im Suden, 105 Ibid., 5:247, #4697.

1924); Little Girl-Portrait in Yellow (Id Madchen Bildnis in Gelb, 1925); 106 Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson Portrait of a Madman (Bildnis eines Wahnsinnigen, 1925); Mr. Pep and (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 106; Mikhail Bakhtin,

his Horse (Mr. Pep und sein Pferd, 1925); Mr. Pearlswine (Monsieur Per- "The Problem of Speech Genres," in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, " lenschwein, 1925); Claudio " (1927); "Charli" (1927); Portrait of Mrs. Gl. ed. Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson (Austin: University of Texas Press,

(Bildnis Frau Gl., 1929); and J., As He Was Still a Child (J., noch Kind, 1986), 91. 1933). For illustrations of these and other examples, see Helfenstein and 107 Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Painting, Photography, Film, trans. Janet Seligman

Rumelin, Catalogue Raisonne, vols. 3-6. (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1969), 15. ." 108 and bring to life actual historical tensions

For Walter Benjamin aura was synonymous with continuity of experience, which he termed Erfahrung. "Where there is experience in the strict sense of the word, certain contents of the individual past combine with material of the collective past.

Rituals with their ceremonies, their festivals,... kept producing the amalgamation of these two elements of memory over and over again. They triggered recollection at certain times and remained

109 available to memory throughout people's lives ." Precisely such experience, like aura itself, Benjamin believed, had atrophied in the face of the shocks, discontinuity, and cultural fragmentation of modernity—what he called Erlebni s. In the work of Marcel Proust,

Benjamin saw an example of the prodigious effort required of a modern artist to achieve that sense of Erfahrung: "A la recherche du temps perdu," he wrote, "may be regarded as an attempt to

produce experience synthetically . ..under today's conditions, for

." 110 there is less and less hope that it will come into being naturally

It is tempting to see Klee's parodic art in similar terms. Combining parodic allusion to the representational genres of past art with indisputably modernist formal means that broke with the tradition of Western painting, he created works in which "the what-has-been

111 comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation ."

In this sense Klee was indeed "abstract with memories."

108 Hutcheon, Parody, xii.

109 Beniamin, SW 4, 316; GS, 1:611.

110 Ibid., 315; 1:610. 111 Benjamin, Arcades Project, 462, Convolute N2a, 3 (altered translation);

GS, 5:576. Benjamin is defining what he calls the "dialectical image," a

relation to the past that is not purely temporal nor characterized by continu-

ity, but dialectical, an image that is "not archaic." ;

Maria del Rosario Acosta Framing Klee's Window

You who separate and attract,

changing like the oceans—

sudden reflection, where our face contemplates itself

mingling with what is seen on the other side;

sample of a compromised freedom,

for destiny is present-

taken by the one among us which tempers

the outside's great excess.

—Rainer Maria Rilke 1

A window: the symbol of an opening gaze. A threshold that points out, in the distance that it frames, an impossible landscape. As it separates and attracts simultaneously, a window is but a mirror that barely lets us glimpse at the other—inaccessible—side of what we wish to see. Whoever were to tell its history would recall the history of this impossibility: the history of a gaze that, going beyond itself, finds itself at the end, as in Rilke's poem, halfway between the window and the mirror, between transparency and reflection.

This might be the destiny of Alberti's window: it opens up the history of painting in the Renaissance and, since then, inaugurates art's path as re-presentation. Understood as an open window, painting frames the world it wants to bring back by definitively separating the inside from the outside. The work of art's claim for transparency bears witness to its own opacity: the window would have always only been the mirror that, broken into fragments—as in some of Magritte's works (see, for example, Key to the Fields, 1933)—reveals the paradox of all representation: that it is only possible when that which seeks representation is sacrificed.

Therefore, the world that opens up is already a lost world.

Yet this is not the secret that lies behind Rilke's window: a gaze which, going beyond itself, makes space explode allowing our finiteness to be penetrated, for an instant, by "the outside's great excess." As in those fragments of the world, which are the works of art according to Klee, these window panes do not frame or delimit, they do not lead anywhere; they already are that place where everything happens. In between the window and the mirror, Klee's work displaces all metaphors: what is visible in itself takes off before our eyes in an everlasting uncompleted movement whose nature is to be created continually, unfolding itself as we look at it. Thus, can works of art still be viewed as and through the window?

1 Toi qui separes et qui attires, / changeante comme la mer, / glace, soudain, ou notre figure se mire / melee a ce qu'on voit a travers; / echantillon d'une liberte compromise / par la presence du sort / prise par laquelle parmi nous s'egalise / le grand trop du dehors (Rainer Maria Rilke, "Les Fenetres 4," in Poemas franceses, trans. Tomas Segovia [Valencia: Pre-textos, 1997]). 77 to (re)present the paradox of all representation. This is the only

way in which all the possibilities of appearance may be opened:

this is the quest Klee's work has set out to accomplish. The con-

Surely they are not (or at least not only) Alberti's window: "I cern here is not, then, to free art from metaphors, but to summon

inscribe a quadrangle of right angles, as large as I wish, which them into movement in behalf of discovering, from the inside, their

is considered to be an open window through which I see what I hidden treasure.

2 want to paint." The window's transparency allows the work of Consequently, if Alberti's window conjures the artistic creed art to reflect within its own frame, the reality that has been left of a historical period as the representation and reproduction of , outside, separated, waiting to be represented, described, and what is visible, Klee's sense of appearance must lead in another interpreted in the painting. Nature speaks through the window; direction. Alberti considers painting's dominion to be framed by as a result, its language is translated to the known idiom of repre- a visible range, by what strictly appears before our eyes: "No sentation. This is, as Klee acknowledges, the heritage carried out one would deny that the painter has nothing to do with things that by works of art: a tradition in which it is necessary to move, in any are not visible. The painter is concerned solely with representing

9 case, if painting's most valuable aspect is not to be sacrificed: "a what he can see." However, even though Klee is also concerned clear view of history should save us from desperately searching with what we can see, the relation between the artist and what is

3 for novelty at the cost of naturalness." visible is radically transformed:

We are still shadowed by the past that the modern painter

8 4 must learn to dwell in. "Today is a transition from yesterday," Yesterday's artistic creed and the related study writes Klee, and "to be new as against yesterday, is still revolu- of nature consisted, it seems safe to say, in a

5 tionary even if it does not shake the immense old world." The painfully precise investigation of appearance.

idea is not to invert the whole history of art and start anew, Klee I and you, the artist and his object, sought remarks, but rather to try introducing new realities, "realities of to establish optical-physical relations across art, realities that make of life something more than, on average, the invisible barrier between the "I" and the

6 it appears to be." Something more than it appears to be, he "you." In this way, excellent pictures were ob- says, and yet, that which appears in the polyphony of colors and tained of the object's surface filtered by the forms, of spatial and temporal dimensions that are his works, air; the art of optical art was developed, while could never be simply understood as a continuation of the pursuit the art of contemplating unoptical impressions of representing reality. Fidelity to nature, a wish hidden behind and representations and of making them vis-

Alberti's window, is also carried out through the history Klee ible was neglected. Yet, the investigation of wishes to continue. Only this time, nonetheless, beginning with a appearance should not be neglected; it ought displacement which, inside the metaphor, makes it explode into merely to be amplified.... The artist of today thousands of "impure crystals" that symbolize, for Klee, the works is more than an improved camera: he is more of art of the present. 7 complex, richer and wider. 10

Hence, in his essay "On Modern Art," Klee lets us know that modern artists must learn to get rid of the restrictions that they are Unlike Alberti's window—understood as a metaphor of rep- compelled to follow when nature is only understood as "culminat- resentation—the modern artist is not constrained by the visible, ing forms." The modern artist "does not feel so bound by these since art makes visible. Thus, confronted by yesterday's artistic realities, because he does not see in these culminating forms the creed, Klee proposes his own "creative credo": "Art does not

11 essence of the creative process of nature" (see Group in Motion reproduce the visible, but makes visible." Therefore, the issue

[bewegte Gruppe ], 1930; plate 24). To be detached from these is no longer about limiting painting's possibilities to the range forms, as ends in themselves, might be the only way to be truly of what is visible, but rather about expanding the possibilities of loyal to such nature. Fidelity, thus, beyond and outside represen- what is visible through painting. Instead of bringing back what

12 tation. Fidelity to what is visible, but no longer in the narrow sense has already been created, art continues creating the world. A of representing what is seen; it requires the gaze to expand and work of art is a window: a window facing a world that is only intensify. The issue is to remain and go beyond Alberti's window; possible through art.

If reproducing what is visible always implies a distant rela-

tion of separation—of opacity, we said earlier, of loss and sacri-

2 Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, trans. John R. Spencer (New Haven: Yale fice—between the presence of the object and its representation, University Press, 1966), 183. the "I" the "you," Klee writes, the artist, 3 Paul Klee, "Ways of Studying Nature," in Notebooks, Volume I: The between and modern Thinking Eye, ed. Jurg Spiller, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: George on the other hand, expects to restore continuity between nature Wittenborn, 1961), 63. and art: "there are other ways of looking into the object. ..which 4 Paul Klee, The Diaries of Paul Klee, 1898- 1918, ed. Felix Klee (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964), #951. 5 Klee, "Ways of Studying Nature," 63. 9 Alberti, On Painting, 43.

6 Paul Klee, "On Modern Art," (in this volume) 14. 10 Klee, "Creative Credo," in The Thinking Eye, 76.

7 Klee, Diaries, #951. 11 Ibid. 8 Klee, "On Modern Art," 13. 12 Klee, "Ways of Studying Nature," 67. create, between the I and the object, a resonance surpassing that is transformed while presented—and never represented—

13 all optical foundations." The modern artist seeks the window's always uneasily trying to hide, to make itself secret: "the object

presence by breaking the boundaries of representation. "By grows beyond its appearance through our knowledge of its inner yearning to free ourselves from earthly bonds. ..we free ourselves being, through the knowledge that the thing is more than its out-

14 23 from constraint in pure mobility." Thus, if art continues creating ward aspect suggests." Speaking with nature, being loyal to it

nature, a non-stopping creation that is in itself pure mobility, it through works of art, is "not in the direction of fidelity to a nature

has stopped speaking about nature (as if it were telling a story) that is under scientific control," but rather, writes Klee, the kind of 24 and now speaks with nature: "for the artist, dialogue with nature fidelity that can only grow out of freedom. A kind of freedom,

15 remains a conditio sine qua non." This is its activity; this is its he proceeds, related to having dared make a way into nature's

becoming present as a work of art. It dialogues with nature to womb, to having learned "to be as mobile as grand nature itself 25 transform it over and over again as we gaze at it. Art, says Klee, is mobile." Following these thoughts, Klee declares, "the pres-

16 is "nature's altered image." ent stage of the world of appearances, the one that happens to

What does this "alteration" involve? What kind of nature is meet [the artist's] eye," is "all-too-limited in contrast to the world

altered as it becomes present in art? If what is at stake here is not of which he has caught a glimpse that runs deeper, the world he 26 only the alteration but also the expansion of a gaze, we might has felt in a more animated way." To honor this nature, that con-

have to reformulate these questions and rather ask: Of what tinues its process of creation through art, is to allow the work of

nature is this nature that can only be seen through art? Well, art to open up to the ever-changing presentation of what is made

according to Klee, a work of art is capable of speaking with visible and, furthermore, of the making visible itself.

what is not seen by our eyes; with those "unoptical impressions" This is the work of art's only truth. This and only this one,

first is its that will be made visible, for the time, by the artist's creative says Klee, the truth of mirror (see Absorption [ Versunkenheit ],

capacity. 1919; plate 41 ):

Regarding the dialogue with nature, the artist, says Klee,

takes a "modest position," he is a mediator: "He neither serves There are some who will not be able to ac-

nor rules, but merely mediates"; beauty "has merely passed knowledge the truth of my mirror. They should

1 through him." He is thus the trunk of the tree through which the bear in mind that I am not here to reflect the

juices flow from the roots up to the crown: "moved and compelled surface (a photographic plate can do that) but

by the power of those streaming juices, he conducts what he is must look within. I reflect the innermost heart.

18 looking at into the work" (see Little Tree [ Baumchen ], 1935; I write the words on the forehead and around

plate 9). Nonetheless, what the artist has seen is not something the corners of the mouth. My human faces are

that can simply be represented, copied, and retransmitted in the truer than real ones. If I were to paint a re-

work of art that is the tree's crown: "It would not occur to anyone ally truthful self-portrait, you would see an odd

to demand of the tree that it shape its crown exactly like its root Shell. Inside it, as everyone should be made

structure. Everyone will understand that the below and the above to understand, would be myself, like the kernel

19 cannot mirror one another perfectly." What the artist has seen in a nut. Such a work might also be called an 20 27 drives the elements of nature to be born again through art, to allegory of crust formation.

displace and leave "their well-appointed sites, so that.. .they may

elevate themselves to a new order." 21

What the artist has seen is not limited namely to what is "vis-

ible"; moreover, it speaks to us and is capable of "making vis- The same year Klee publishes his "Creative Credo," Rilke

ible" what has been seen in secret: "the womb of nature, in the writes the following in one of his letters:

primal ground of Creation, which holds the secret key to every- 22 thing that is." The artist is capable, therefore, of making visible Who would once write the history of the win- what makes the visible possible: the ground of visibility itself (see dow, this wonderful framing of our everyday

To Make Visible [ sichtbar machen ], 1926; plate 59). existence— perhaps within its most proper

This is precisely the expansion of visibility; this is just what measure—a window continually filled by an

is involved in fidelity toward nature. A kind of nature, therefore, over-flowing creation; that is all we have of

the world.... Yet the window places us in re-

lation, and measures our correspondence to 13 Ibid., 66. to in instant that 14 Ibid., 67. what has yet come the very

15 Ibid., 63.

16 Klee, "On Modern Art," 10.

17 Ibid.

18 Ibid. 23 Klee, "Ways of Studying Nature," 66.

19 Ibid. 24 Klee, "On Modern Art," 14.

20 Ibid., 11. 25 Ibid.

21 Ibid., 12. 26 Ibid., 13-14.

22 Ibid., 14. 27 Klee, The Thinking Eye, 20. 28 is space . Works of art, Rilke wrote elsewhere, are different from other

things in the world because they are things from the future, things

Here the window does not only appear as space going whose time has not yet arrived. That is why they are windows beyond itself to encounter infinity, but also as an opening in time facing the future, facing what the artist perceives is still to come. instantly inaugurated by space. If, as it has been taken under In a passage that refers tacitly to Aristotle's classic notion of art consideration, Klee's work assumes that this window's spatial as developed in his Poetics, Klee writes: "I do not really want to explosion is the place where we encounter the primordial, the render the human being as he is, but rather in the way he might 33 archetype, the origin of all origins and, therefore, the ground be ." The artist cares for the possibilities of appearance, for their of visibility itself, Rilke's second suggestion will now allow us to permanent movement and passage in time, "back there forward

." 34 look at Klee's work as an instance of a different temporality: as to the here and now This is what Klee considers to be true a threshold facing a future that art makes present; as something nature. And in honor of its infinite mobility—the artist, like the poet, yet to come, says Rilke, that is announced by the limits that are behaves as a "philosopher"; "He says to himself, restricting him- framed by the window itself. The window is not, thus, a bridge self to this world": leading to representation. Its opening can no longer be understood as a passage to a world "outside" whose presence before Our world once upon a time looked different, our eyes ought to be taken as a promise to be fulfilled. What this and it will look different again. And, leaning is about is a world (a time) inaugurated in the very instant the toward the Beyond, he opines: On other stars work of art occurs; in the occurrence of space constituted by an things may have assumed very different forms. act of circumscription, of limitation. Time and space exchange Such mobility on the paths of natural Creation places so the occurrence, which is, according to Klee, the work is a good school of formation for him. It allows of art's truth, can take place/time: "for space itself is a temporal one who creates to move from the ground up- zv concept. ward, and, being himself mobile, he will be

This is the way the work of art behaves according to Klee. careful to let freedom prevail in the develop-

." 31 35 A work of art, he says, is a "shelter for movement However, ment of his paths of configuration . it is only inside the limits that circumscribe it, and only because of them, that it can be boundless: opening inside toward infinite Continuing the creation of the world while expanding visibil- movement, always protected by that which takes it in as pres- ity does not only imply an expansion of space but also of time. ence: This expansion wanders alonq the path Klee calls qenesis; the

"womb of nature," the mystery of creation that lies before the

The interior is infinite, in its absoluteness and eyes of whoever has a sufficiently penetrating gaze to see it. This

in its most proper mystery, the loaded dot, the is the only thing the artist "reproduces"— if the matter here is still

absolute sum of infinity. Comparison with na- about reproducing—in the work of art; it is the only thing that may

ture: the seed. The exterior is finite; hence, it be presented pictoria I ly: "Creation lives as genesis under the vis-

is the end of dynamic forces, the limit of its ible surface of the work. All those touched by the spirit see this

31 effects . in retrospective, but only the creative see it looking forward (into 36 the future )."

As a seed, the work of art contains within itself all the possibilities Consequently, Klee considers the work of art's appearance of what is yet to be, of what is to come, to become; it announces to be a window that is, in itself, an opening: not a passage, and the future Rilke speaks about in his letter. It is an unfinished pro- much less a mirror—although it does share something with both cess that, nonetheless, is only made possible because of its own of these—but rather a shelter: care and presence, production and limitation, the "finite exterior" that contains it: the window's frame, reproduction of genesis. The image presented in such a work of perhaps, or the window's—framed—appearance as an instant in art, which is grasped by the artist, is, as he recalls, "the image of space: "As projection the work of art is 'forever starting' and 'for- 32 ever limited .'"

into an "untenable hermeneutic nihilism" (Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth

and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall [London:

28 Letter from Rilke to Nanny Wunderly-Volkart, Aug. 27, 1 920 (Rainer Maria Continuum, 2004], 82), precisely because it does not limit in any way

Rilke, Briefe: Volume I [Frankfurt: Schweizerischen Landesbibliothek, the possibilities of interpretation. Klee, on the other hand, considers that

1977], 315). I must thank Antonia Egel for sharing the correct reference of only within these limits—opened in and by the work of art itself—an infinite,

this quote with me, and for her help translating it into English. unfinished movement appears before the spectator. I think this might stand

29 Klee, "Creative Credo," 78. near Gadamer's notion of play (spiel): an opening of possibilities, "an

30 Paul Klee, Notebooks, Volume 2: The Nature of Nature, ed. Jurg Spiller, encounter with an unfinished event" Truth and Method, that always ( 85)

trans. Heinz Norden (London: Lund Humphries, 1970), 47. takes place in space, in a place already determined beforehand by the

31 Ibid., 49. work of art itself (thus, the game has priority over the player) Truth and (

32 Klee, The Thinking Eye, 59. Although it is not the present essay's purpose, Method, 102ff.). one may identify close connections between Klee's position and Gadamer's 33 Klee, "On Modern Art," 14.

stand and critique in relation to certain modern tendencies of interpreting 34 Ibid., 13.

art. Valery's position, for instance—which has echoed throughout twentieth- 35 Ibid.

century theorists and artists—runs the risk, according to Gadamer, of falling 36 Monday, July 3, 1922 in Klee, The Thinking Eye, 463. —

37 Creation as Genesis, for him the sole essential image." He takes away, requires its movement to be a constant opening up, an

this up again in his "Creative Credo": "The work of art is first unconcealment that Heidegger considers "the work-being of the 38 of all genesis; it is never experienced purely as a result." "It is work." Without going further into this relation, we may add that 39 something I won't get tired of repeating," he writes, once again, Heidegger's posture does not seem to be very far from what 48 in his notes to the Bauhaus: "a work is not primarily a product; it Klee denominates genesis. The relation between art and nature 40 is first and foremost genesis, work in progress." occurs precisely because of the work's possibility to continue

This is why it is most necessary to speak about formation nature's most proper creation. Therefore, what is shown or what

[Gesfa/fung] rather than of form [Gesfa/f]: we can see is always a mystery that can only be contemplated

secretly, thus, it hides in the process of its presentation (see Green 49 is Terrain l). Form as phenomenon a dangerous chimera. [ grunes Gelcmde ], 1938; plate

Form as movement, as action, is a good thing, Hence, the work of art is never a result, a product; it is never-

active form is good. Form as rest, as end, is ending. As Kandinsky would say about his own works, Klee

bad. Passive, finished form is bad. Formation wishes the spectator to wander about in his paintings. Just as the

is good. Form is bad. Form is the end, death. work is something yet to happen, something always becoming,

41 Formation is movement, act. Formation is life. the spectator learns to go back to it once again looking for the

"surface," which is genesis as creation. To Klee, works are "a 50 If the work of art is compelled to (re)produce nature before our change of air and viewpoint." As Heraclitus's rivers or Rilke's

eyes, what is produced is precisely the irrepresentable: continu- window, works of art are a "life-giving ocean":

ous, unfinished, and never satisfied creation that can only show

itself, says Klee, "symbolically"; that is, as something "poetic and We can still speak rationally of the salutary ef-

not literary.. .as though a certain diffidence stopped it from put- fects of art. We can say that imagination, born 42 ting things the way they are." The language of genesis, of works on the wings of instinctual stimuli, conjures up

of art, that moves spatially and temporally, and whose proper states of being that are somehow more en-

paths, Klee regards, one could not so surely point toward through couraging and more inspiring than those we 43 44 words is the language of "the single living word that wakes." know on earth or in our conscious dreams....

When spoken, it cares for all the "many gaps which must be pres- Let yourself be carried to this life-giving ocean 45 ent in the word, at least implicitly." Therefore, the "truly creative along broad rivers and delightful brooks— like

46 51 person works with the lapidary quality of language." As with the branches of concentrated graphic art.

poetic language, works of art must also be lapidary: each one

must be itself in order to make visible everything that hides under

its presence (see Flight [Flucht], 1940; plate 25 and Emigrating

[auswandern], plate 54). A work of art is its past and its Through a Window ( Durch ein Fenster is the title of one of 1933; )

future, therefore, it is—as Rilke's window—constituted instantly by Klee's paintings made in 1932. This title invites us to interpret the

space and time. It reveals its concealing nature; it makes visible painting's four sections as a window frame. The frame encloses

the paradox of its opening.

The notions of art and nature—or, more precisely, of nature

pensante I (El umbral de la creacion)," in Paul Klee: fragmentos c/e mundo, in art, of art as the continuation of nature's creation— recall the ed. Marfa del Rosario Acosta and Laura Quintana (Bogota: Universidad of physis, in Heraclitus's Greek idea expressed famous sentence de los Andes, 2009), 177-78. used by Heidegger, quoting Durero, at the beginning of his 48 The relations between Klee and Heidegger would be the subject of a different essay. The notion of genesis stands very close to how Heidegger essay on the work of art: physis kripthestai philei, "nature loves describes the way the work of art happens: as a battle between earth and 47 to encrypt itself." The fact that nature "encrypts" itself, or hides world, as an unconcealment. The drawings that Klee uses to illustrate his essay, "Ways of Studying Nature" (Klee, The Thinking Eye, 67) sufficiently

demonstrate this relation. Additionally, Klee considers the work of art

37 Klee, "On Modern Art," 13. to be the presentation of the unfinished process of this original battle

38 Klee, The Thinking Eye, 78. occasionally he calls this tragedy. Some of these ideas will be brought

39 Klee, The Nature of Nature, 270. out in the last section of the present essay. For a more detailed analysis

40 Monday, July 3, 1922 in Klee, The Thinking Eye, 449. on the possible relations between Heidegger and Klee (particularly on

41 Klee, The Thinking Eye, 169; see also Klee, The Nature of Nature, 269. the sense of techne and its possibilities explored in Klee's works as they

42 Klee, The Thinking Eye, 430. were perceived by Heidegger, see John Sallis, La mirada de las cosas: el 43 Klee, "On Modern Art," 9. arte como provocation, ed. and trans. Marfa del Rosario Acosta [Bogota:

44 Monday, July 3, 1922 in Klee, The Thinking Eye, 449. Universidad de los Andes, CESO, 2008], 69ff. ).

45 Ibid. 49 Heidegger recalls: "The Greeks early called this emerging and rising in itself

46 Ibid. and in all things physis...we call this ground the earth." "The earth appears

47 Heraclitus's sentence belongs to fragment 123 in Hermann Diels, Die openly clear as itself only when it is perceived and preserved as that which

Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (1903), 6th rev. ed. by Walther Kranz (Berlin: is by nature undisclosable, that which shrinks from every disclosure and

Weidemann, 1952). The reference to Durero is found in Heidegger's work, constantly keeps itself closed up" (Martin Heidegger, "The Origin of the

Holzwege, in Gesamtausgabe, vol. 5 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1950), 60. Work of Art," in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter [New

The relation between Heraclitus's sentence and Heidegger's thought is York: Harper and Row, 2001 ], 41, 46).

not explicit throughout his essay "The Origin of the Work of Art." I owe 50 Klee, "Creative Credo," 80.

the evidence of this relation to a text by Mauricio Gonzalez, "La imagen 51 Ibid. —

a series of irregular colored squares placed one over another; It is not at all the painter's business, as may be they are covered by a technique Klee used in the early thirties: supposed, to give us through his work of art pointillism Pointillieren which—in the manner of Seurat—involves an idea of the subject that he brings before ( ), distributing colored dots throughout the painting's fragments to us.... What should enchant us is not the sub- expose the work's multiple dimensions and possibilities within the ject of the painting and its lifelikeness, but the colors' different levels of appearance (and no longer in order to pure appearance which is wholly without the obtain a realistic image). The dialogue between the color spread sort of interest that the subject has; [that is] ap- out by the dots—originally white but covered subsequently by pearance for its own sake, and art is mastery varnishes of color—and the color of the squares intends to show in the portrayal of all the secrets of this ever part of the "polyphony" and "multidimensionality" that Klee talks profounder pure appearance of external re- about in many of his essays on art. alities.... This mastery in the production of the

In this case, the "through" is a trail left across the inversion most striking effects through the magic of co- of Alberti's metaphor. More precisely, it is a trace of what has lour and the secrets of its spell has now an already been withdrawn. The work of art as a window, the win- independent justification. The chief thing now dow as a work of art, is still an opening, an expansion of a gaze, is—independently of the topic itself—the visible an instauration of the visible. Nonetheless, the opening, the element of colour and lighting. This is, as it 55 expansion, and the instauration are now linked to what the work were, an objective music, a peal in colour . has to say within itself, in the intimacy of its exposure and secrecy.

A ceaseless movement makes the visible as it wanders about the In the process of its own dissolution, painting's "chief interest" temporal space which opens up inside of it—in this sense, it brings is revealed; here Hegel does not intend to announce a future, down the bridges through which we once traveled from one side in a strict sense, but only to describe what he finds presently in 56 to another. Dutch painting: the Kunstleriche Scheinenmachen, the "artistic 57 This is the nature of a work of art that has recognized itself as production of shining ," that is, the making of appearance, of an image and has traveled its own trails of consciousness in the visibility itself. history of representation. Regarding this matter, Nancy writes— Hence, the dissolution that conjures the metaphor within itself, using a language that stands very close to the one suggested by which is barely suggested in Hegel's work, is precisely what Klee the image of Klee's window: "[the image] crosses the distance is concerned about making explicit. To make appear, to create of the withdrawal even while maintaining it through its mark as appearances, and to introduce in the visible something that other- an image. Or rather: through the mark that it is, it establishes wise would never, at any rate, be present: that is the artist's task: simultaneously a withdrawal and a passage that, however, does 52 not pass ." Something has been made visible which could

Klee speaks to us—in conscious reference to tradition—about not have been perceived without the effort to the dissolution of figurative form carried out in his work. A dissolu- make it visible. Yes, you might see something, tion beginning inside the metaphor in a self-referential movement but you would have no exact knowledge of it. that characterizes what could be read in Hegel's Lectures on But here we are entering the realm of art; here

Aesthetics—following John Sallis's suggestion—as the "future" of we must be very clear about the aim of "mak- 53 art . Art can overcome itself from within itself—declares Hegel- ing-visible." Are we merely noting things seen dissolving its traditional narrative-representative structure. It in order to remember them or are we also should stop being considered the means to an end beyond itself trying to reveal what is not visible? Once we even though this end may only be carried out by and in art—to know and feel this distinction, we have come 58 become, rather, a discourse on its very nature. The way Hegel to the fundamental point of artistic creation . describes painting's own process of dissolution suggests certain 54 similarities to what happens in art since quests like Klee's . To make visible does not mean the work will perpetuate what

must be sacrificed in order to be represented. The work of art

52 Jean-Luc Nancy, "The Image—the Distinct," in The Ground of the Image, is no longer the memory of what is seen; it does not verify, in trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 3.

53 For a detailed discussion on this interpretation, see Sallis, La mirada de

las cosos and Sallis, Transfigurements: On the True Sense of Art (Chicago: art's way of being, not its formal content. The work's gaze and the work

University of Chicago Press), 158-59. The close relation between Hegel's itself: the gaze that opens up to understanding the work as genesis. Thus,

notions of painting—especially seventeenth-century Dutch painting, which is the object may appear, says Klee in "On Modern Art," but only as another

the example Hegel has in mind when he speaks about art as dissolution— dimension—as a happy coincidence—yet not as an end to a pictorial quest.

and contemporary pictorial expressions was first suggested to me by "The quarrel has less to do with the question of the object's existence and

Professor John Sallis in his courses on philosophy and art in Boston College more to do with any given appearance of this object, with the kind of object

during the winter semester of 2006. it is" (Klee, "On Modern Art," 12).

54 I think that Klee, much more than any other contemporary artist—such as 55 G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox, 2 vols. Kandinsky—best represents the idea of the dissolution of the metaphor of (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 1:598-600.

representation from within the work of art. Klee, unlike Kandinsky, is not 56 Ibid., 2:812.

concerned with moving definitely toward "abstraction" as a disappearance 57 Sallis, Transfigurements, 96.

of all figurative form. What must be transformed is the gaze, the work of 58 Monday, July 3, 1922 in Klee, The Thinking Eye, 454. . —

its presence, what the representation lacks. This is no longer its creation is "man's fundamental tragedy": "man is half a prisoner, 65 paradox. "The visible is only an isolated case taken from the half borne on wings" (see Hardly Still Walking , Not Yet Flying 59 universe. ..there are more truths unseen than seen." Thus, does [geht kaum mehr, fliegt noch nicht], 1927; plate 15). Like the

"making visible" involve translating into the language of appear- human being, the work of art is also a prisoner of the impossibil- ance what otherwise would remain hidden? Is this what it means ity of saying something that needs to remain in silence, of keep- to make the invisible visible? Is this supposed to be the artist's ing quiet what is being said. Its eloquence is never completely task now? silent; its silence never reaches the "claim of the absolute" that, 66 The artist "can bring things into being and make even their to Klee, is present in everything that is artistic. Rather, like the 60 motion visible." Therefore, it is not precisely a translation. To one winged hero Klee painted in 1905, whom he writes about make visible is not to show in other ways and from a different in his Diaries: perspective what is already there; rather, it means bringing things into being, through movement, as they enter the work's continu- "The hero with one wing," a tragicomic hero. ous process of creation. Movement is what becomes visible in Perhaps a Don Quixote of ancient times. This works of art. Once again: genesis. formula and poetic idea, which made its ap-

Consequently, things have a particular way of being in art; pearance in November 1904, has now finally one might even say they have their own untranslatable lan- been clarified and developed. The man, born guage. If language cannot be reduced to be the communication with only one wing, in contrast with divine of what can be communicated, since it is always also a symbol creatures, makes incessant efforts to fly. In do- of what is incommunicable (to borrow an expression used by ing so, he breaks his arms and legs, but per- 67 Walter Benjamin), perhaps Klee's making visible involves making sists under the banner of his idea. visible language's most proper incommunicability which art has the power to "touch," to "see" interruptedly, and to show as it This hero might be the artist or, perhaps, the work of art itself tries to translate it into appearance. On this behalf, it cannot be a work of art that knows about the failure of its appearance, but separated from the implications that concern this relation with that knows it just as the hero knows about his destiny: in order to any kind of language, with any presence of a symbolic nature. summon it, once and again, in the tragedy of its own representa-

There is a constant loss of the visible in art's effort to make things tion. visible by bringing them into presence. There is an implicit hiding away in all intent to introduce what is not visible in the field of This paper would not have been possible without the assistance

appearance. Once again: exposure and secrecy, although no of Tania Ganitsky, who helped me with translating and editing its longer in the sense of what is being represented but in the sense final version. of the work's process of presentation.

"The power of creativity cannot be named. It remains mysterious to the end. But what does not shake us to our foundations

61 is no mystery." Thus, is the unnameable what becomes visible in the work of art? Is the work of art, in this sense, the action of keeping quiet? "Nature is loquacious to the point of confusion, 62 let therefore the artist be silent." Hence, to make visible is, perhaps, initially also a way to guard the unnameable's mystery: the unfinished movement that speaks only about what it does not say, that only communicates its keeping quiet. The work of art is its own unfinished language.

This is just how Gadamer describes the event of modern art: the "speechlessness" of modern art "which addresses us so forc-

63 ibly with its unique mute eloquence." This search for silence, for its eloquence, might possibly be the tragedy Klee refers to as the destiny of every work of art. "Thus there is tragedy in the very beginning," Klee writes, "and correspondingly in the continua- 64 tion of the process." The tragedy that goes through the work's

59 Klee, "Creative Credo," 78-79. 60 Klee, The Thinking Eye, 60.

61 Ibid., 17

62 Monday, July 3, 1 922 in ibid., 450.

63 Hans-Georg Gadamer, "The Speechless Image," in The Relevance of the

Beautiful, ed. R. Bernasconi, trans. N. Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge 65 Ibid.

University Press, 1986), 83-84. 66 Monday, July 3, 1 922 in ibid., 461

64 Klee, The Thinking Eye, 40 7. 67 Klee, Dianes, #585.

Galen A. Johnson Metamorphosis and Music: Klee and Merleau-Ponty

In this paper it is my goal to establish the history of the significance of Paul Klee for Merleau-Ponty's

own thinking about art and for his philosophy of nature as it unfolds in Eye and Mind, The Visible and the

Invisible, and the Nature lecture courses. In particular, we will be interested in how Klee's thought and art

played a powerful role in Merleau-Ponty's re-conceptualization of nature in terms of genesis, metamorpho-

sis, and the movement of life. Clarifying these ideas will lead us toward a better understanding of what Klee

meant by abstraction and a "new romanticism" that he names a "cool romanticism," which we will argue is

best conceptualized in relation to Klee's researches into the relationships between music and painting. We

will be aided in these endeavors by looking at one constant motif in Klee's paintings of nature—the evolution

of his paintings of trees and Goethe's romantic thesis that "all is leaf." Merleau-Ponty's late writings concep-

tualize Nature as a "leaf of Being."

THE HISTORY OF THE SIGNIFICANCE OF KLEE FOR MERLEAU-PONTY

The influence of Paul Klee on Merleau-Ponty's essay on philosophy and modern art, Eye and Mind

(1961 ), is stamped in nearly every one of the five sections of the work. Klee is cited regarding reversibility

between the artist and nature, regarding the "dimension of color," "the flexuous line," regarding depth,

movement, metamorphosis, "the spark of fire" between sensing and sensible, absolute painting, and the

question of giving titles to works. This all culminates in Merleau-Ponty's citation, at the end of part four, of

Klee's words inscribed on his tombstone and incorporated as the last page of Klee's Diaries: "I cannot be

1 grasped in immanence." While Merleau-Ponty was working intently on Eye and Mind during 1959 through

the summer of 1960, nearly simultaneously there was an explosion of interest in Klee in France. The first volume of Klee's pedagogical journals from his Bauhaus years (1921 -31 that were edited and published )

in German in 1956 as Das bildnerische Denken appeared in French translation in 1959. The first German

edition of Klee's 1898-1918 diaries also appeared in French in the same year, translated by Klossowski

and cited by Merleau-Ponty. Finally, Will Grohmann's then definitive study of Klee, cited extensively in Eye

2 and Mind, had been translated from German into French in 1954.

Previous to Eye and Mind, Merleau-Ponty's earliest reference to Klee is found in The Prose of the World

( 1951 ), in its chapter "The Indirect Language." There, Merleau-Ponty contests Malraux's subjectivistic inter-

1 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Eye and Mind, in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, 121 -49, ed. and

intro. Galen A. Johnson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 148. French original: L'oeil et I'esprit (Paris: Gallimard,

1964), 87. The full epitaph in German reads as follows: "Diesseitig bin ich gar nicht fassbar, denn ich wohne grad so gut bei den

Toten wie bei den Ungeborenen." The translation that Merleau-Ponty inserts into Eye and Mind is freer and more philosophical

than the German original for Merleau-Ponty chooses the word "immanence" which implies its binary, "transcendence." The

French translation by Klossowski is nearer the German original: "Ici-bas je ne suis guere saisissable, car j'habite tout aussi bien

chez les morts que chez ceux qui ne sont pas nes encore" (Paul Klee, Journal, trans. Pierre Klossowski [Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1959], 354).

2 Will Grohmann, Paul Klee, trans. Jean Descoullayes and Jean Philippon (Paris: Flinker, 1954). 85 12 13 pretation of modern painting and writes that "it would be hard themselves, and the metamorphosis of time. The metamor-

3 to apply these definitions to Cezanne or Klee." After 1951, phosis of time refers explicitly to Rodin's success with express- references to Klee reappear and multiply in Merleau-Ponty's ing movement in bronze in a work such as The Walking Man 1958-59 course, "La philosophie aujourd'hui." There, Merleau- L'homme qui marche), "The person bestrides space," and ( 1907.

Ponty cites from Henri Michaux's "Adventures of Lines" from his the work makes movement visible by its internal discordance. It

Passages on the lines of Klee. Michaux writes that Klee frees the portrays the body in an attitude that it never at any instant really line and is capable even of making a line dream, wait, hope, or held, legs and trunk each taken at a different instant, thus causing

4 14 think. Merleau-Ponty also discusses Klee's titles, and very impor- "transition and duration to arise in bronze." Rodin's Walking tantly, the leading epigram for Eye and Mind from Gasquet's Man is a precedent for the powerful movement expressed by

book on Cezanne: "What I am trying to convey to you is more the forward posture Klee captured in his pen and ink drawing, mysterious; it is entwined in the very roots of being, in the impal- Striding Man (schreitendor Mann), 1937.

5 pable source of sensations." Following the citation, Merleau- "Metamorphosis" refers to the action or process of changing

Ponty makes the remarkable comment that the ontological "solu- in appearance, form, shape, or substance. The word is from the

6 tion is to search in a study of Klee." He goes on to speak of Greek root morphe, meaning form, which combined with m eta,

Klee's trip to Tunisia in 1914 and his discovery of color as well of means "to transform." Morphology is the branch of biology that

Klee's discovery of abstraction as a way of approaching some- deals with the forms of living organisms and the relationships thing concrete and a way of searching for "transcendence." In between their structures and successive phases. In the history of the course of the following year, 1960-61, "L'ontologie cartesi- Western biology we find a broad range of meanings of "meta- enne et l'ontologie d'aujourd'hui," Merleau-Ponty returned to morphosis," encompassing the remarkable variations of form

Klee's colors and, again following Michaux, describes them as exhibited by many insects and amphibians such as the butterfly

7 "exhaled at the right spot like patina or a mold." He adds that and the frog, which undergo "serial metamorphosis," as well as

Klee's line is "serpentine" and that "the line does not imitate the the transformations that exist between species or types in the his-

8 15 visible, it 'renders visible.'" Throughout the years 1958-61, the tory of evolutionary time. Klee studied and repeatedly drew thought and art of Paul Klee had thoroughly invaded the philoso- nature's metamorphoses in the plant kingdom from seed to stem, phy of Merleau-Ponty. to leaf, to tree, to flower, to fruit, and again to seed. In fact, Klee

placed his own notion of "form-giving life" at the heart of what he

called "the elementary theory of creativity." He deplored theo-

METAMORPHOSIS AND FORM-GIVING ries of form as fixed, static, permanent, immobile, as found in LIFE; THE THEM E OF TREES AND LEAVES Platonism. He wrote:

One way to read Eye and Mind is in terms of Merleau-Ponty's aesthetics and philosophy of art, and we have done so in the Form must on no account ever be considered

9 past. Nevertheless, it is readily apparent that we can also read as something to be got over with, as a result, the work in terms of Merleau-Ponty's emerging philosophy of as an end, but rather as genesis, growth, es- nature, for the terms metamorphosis, genesis, movement, and sence.... What is good is form as movement, life are found throughout the essay. His lecture courses at the as action, as active form.... Form-giving is

College de France for three successive academic years from movement, action. Form-giving is life. These

1956 to 1960 just prior to the composition and publication of sentences constitute the gist of the elementary

Eye and Mind had turned to "the concept of nature." In Eye and theory of creativity. We have now got to the

10 Mind, Merleau-Ponty speaks of the metamorphosis of Being, heart of it. Its significance is absolutely basic;

11 the metamorphosis of seeing, the metamorphosis of things and I don't think I can repeat the sentences

often enough. 16

3 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World, trans. John O'Neill In a related text, Klee states: "Let us, therefore, think not of form (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 55. French original: La

prose du mo ride (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 77. but of the act of forming.... Let us step by step translate this ten-

4 Henri Michaux, Passages (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), 175-78. Cf. Maurice dency from the small to the larger, advance towards the reali- Merleau-Ponty, Notes de cours, 1959- ed. Stephanie Menase (Paris: 1967 , Gallimard, 1996), 52. 5 "Ce que j'essaie de vous traduire est plus mysterieux, s'enchevetre aux

racines memes de I'etre, a la source impalpable des sensations" (Merleau- 12 Ibid., 132; 41.

Ponty, Notes de cours, 55). 13 Ibid., 145; 80.

6 Ibid., "Solution a chercher dans une etude de Klee." 14 Ibid., 145; 79.

7 Ibid., "...exhalees au bon endroit comme patine ou moisissure." 15 Cf. Adolf Portmann, "Goethe and the Concept of Metamorphosis," trans.

8 Ibid., "La ligne n'imite pas le visible, elle 'rend visible.'" Frederick Amrine, in Goethe and the Sciences: A Reappraisal, ed. Frederick

9 Cf. Galen A. Johnson, "Chapter Two: Thinking Through Eye and Mind," in Amrine, Francis J. Zucker, and Harvey Wheeler (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, The Retrieval of the Beautiful: Thinking Through Merleau-Ponty's Aesthetics 1987), 133-36.

(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2010). Also cf. Galen A. Johnson, 16 Paul Klee, Notebooks, Volume 2: The Nature of Nature, 2nd ed., ed.Jurg

ed., The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader. Spiller, trans. Heinz Norden (London: Lund Humphries, 1992), 269. German

10 Merleau-Ponty, Eye and Mind, 128; L'oeil et I'esprit, 28. original: Form- und Gestaltungslehre 2: Unendliche Naturgeschichte, ed.

11 Ibid., 130; 34. Jurg Spiller (Basel: Schwabe, 1970). 25 sation of the whole, retain creative leadership, never allow the "with paintings, tombs, culture." Merleau-Ponty asks, in what

17 creative reins to drop from our hands." This goes together with does metamorphosis consist? He answers that it means there is

Klee's view that the work of art "is first of all genesis.... The picto- no "descent" of reflection into a body of which the body would rial work springs from movement, it is itself fixated movement, and be only the instrument. There is a simultaneity between the body

18 it is grasped in movement." and reflection in which the human body achieves a depth over

Influenced by Gestalt psychology, the notion of form in time, which is an intersubjectivity and intercorporiety that is com-

Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception is concerned munication and culture. Merleau-Ponty concludes: "Thereby this 26 with the relationships among foreground and background, figure is not a hierarchical but a lateral relation, or Ineinander," an and horizon, parts and whole, and particularly how these rela- "intertwining" in the morphological metamorphosis between the tionships are altered when things or light are placed in motion. animal, pre-hominid, and human.

Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology is wholly consistent with Klee To demonstrate how profoundly this re-conceptualization regarding movement and form-giving life: form, he argues, is not of nature in terms of metamorphosis marks a decisive shift in static but most profoundly experienced in living movement as the Merleau-Ponty's late philosophy of nature, we need only refer perception of depth, or, in Husserl's language, as a "synthesis to those passages in his very first book, The Structure of Behavior of transition." Following Robert Delaunay, Merleau-Ponty wrote (1939), in which Merleau-Ponty advocates precisely for a rup-

19 in Eye and Mind, "depth is the new inspiration." He argued ture between human and animal forms. There he argued that "the against the way depth is conceived of in geometric, Cartesian word 'life' does not have the same meaning in animality and space, that is, as diminished to a third dimension and compre- humanity. ..the act of dressing becomes the act of adornment or hended merely as breadth seen from the side. Rather Merleau- also of modesty and thus reveals a new attitude toward oneself 27 Ponty's is a depth of animation, dynamism, radiation, voluminos- and others. Only men see that they are nude." Merleau-Ponty ity, layers, rivals, light and shadows, "a flowing movement of continues this analysis by rehearsing a series of demarcations of 20 planes of color which overlap, advance and retreat." human from animal pertaining to work, speech, art, suicide, and

Merleau-Ponty introduced the concept of metamorphosis into revolution, all of which are marked by the fundamental charac- the final year (1959-60) of his Nature lectures at the College de teristic of "ambiguity," which means a simultaneous positing and

France in a discussion of Teilhard de Chardin's The Phenomenon surpassing or transcendence. Then he concluded that "man can of Man and the kind of metamorphosis that evolves between never be an animal: his life is always more or less integrated than 28 species. The human being is a metamorphosis of animal being, that of an animal." Between 1939 and 1960, the evolution

Merleau-Ponty argued, though not in the terms of a philosophy of Merleau-Ponty's own philosophy regarding life, nature, and of reflection or consciousness, which posits the human being human nature could not be more pronounced, and the thinking as "rational animal," that is, as reason superimposed on body. and art of Paul Klee pertaining to genesis, movement, and life

The sentence from Teilhard that so enchanted Merleau-Ponty was one of the great influences in this metamorphosis. was this: "Man came silently into the world" L'homme est entre In the gallery of eight art works that Merleau-Ponty selected (

21 sans bruit}. That the human being entered silently means "no to publish in Eye and Mind, from Paul Klee he selected Park near 22 rupture." The morphological variations in the preliminary types /.u[cerne] Park bei Lu[zern 1938 (fig. 1). Merleau-Ponty him- ( ]),

("attempts") of hominization before the Age of the Reindeer, that self does not explain directly why he chose this work from Klee's is, before Lascaux, are all transitional forms in which only a few oeuvre, but it was clearly an exemplary work for him that served things are new, for example, erect bipedal posture leaves the as a monogram of the fundamentals of his new philosophy of art forearms free, the eyes get closer together and fix on what the and philosophy of nature, particularly pertaining to the revers- 23 hand takes up, "the very gesture, exteriorized, of reflection." ibility between painter and painted, between human and nature.

"There is a metamorphosis," Merleau-Ponty writes, "not a begin- There are multiple ways of seeing this painting. It is a pictographic 24 ning from zero." In the pre-history of mankind, there were pre- work and if we see it in light of its title, it can appear as the map hominids and without our being able to fix an exact point of of a park or it can be seen more figurally as a park with its bend- appearance, in the Age of the Reindeer there appears the human ing trees. Two dots placed directly in the center and separated

by a curved line form what might be the eyes and nose of a face 17 Klee, The Nature of Nature, 67. looking back at us. The painting brings to mind the citation from 18 Paul Klee, "Creative Credo," in Notebooks, Volume I: The Thinking Eye, Eye and Mind in which Merleau-Ponty quotes Andre Marchand ed. Jurg Spiller, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: George Wittenborn,

1961), 78. German original first published in Tribune der Kunst und Zeit: from his interview with Georges Charbonnier, which Merleau- Eine Schriftensammlung, ed. Kasimir Edschmid (Berlin: Eric Reiss, 1920). Ponty takes to express Klee's sentiment, "as Andre Marchand 19 Merleau-Ponty, Eye and Mind, 140; L'oeil et I'esprit, 64.

says, after Klee [apres K/ee]:" I felt that the trees 20 Ibid., 141; 68. "Some days 21 Cf. Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, trans. Bernard Wall (New York: Harper and Row, 1959), 183, 185.

22 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nature: Course Notes from the College de France, 25 Ibid., 272; 339.

comp. Dominique Seglard, trans. Robert Vallier (Evanston: Northwestern 26 Ibid., 273; 340.

University Press, 2003), 267, 272. French original: La Nature: Notes, cours 27 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behavior, trans. Alden L. Fisher

du College de France (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), 334, 339. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), 174. French original: La structure du

23 Ibid., 267; 334. comportement (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1942), 188.

24 Ibid., 272; 340. 28 Ibid., 181; 196. ] .

Fig. 1: Paul Klee Park near Lu[cerne] ( Park bei Lu[zern]), Fig. 2: Paul Klee, Fig Tree Feigenbaum 1929/240. Watercolor and (1879-1940), ( ), 1938/129. Oil and colored paste on paper and jute fabric, 100 x 70 pencil on paper on cardboard, 28 x 20.8 cm, private collection. cm, Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern. 31 followed by "garden" (185) and "tree" ( 1 03 ) Nevertheless,

were looking at me, were speaking to me...l was there, listen- Grohmann points out that Klee's titles were added post facto as

ing.... I think that the painter must be penetrated by the universe secondary to the primary work of the painting: "Very often pic- 29 and not want to penetrate it." In this way, Park near Lu[cerne] is ture and title so complement each other that the latter adds a

a beautiful embodiment of Merleau-Ponty's concept of aesthetic further nuance to the work, stressing particular elements in it....

reversibility. Left and right, inside and outside, self and other, self Though the titles are only secondary, they betoken a highly sug- 32 and world reverse positions; agent becomes recipient, and activ- gestive intermingling of painting and poetry." So from the point

ity becomes passivity. of view of the philosophy of nature we have been discussing,

Parks and gardens were a constant theme of Klee's nature Park near Lu[cerne appears more abstractly as a suggestion

studies, nature collections, and nature pictures. A beautiful exhi- of beginnings, the description of a pattern of growth: a start, a

bition of these was mounted at the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern in branching, further branching, a new start, here and there sterility

2008 titled In Paul Klee's Enchanted Garden, together with an without branching, but then through the form in the center, the 30 equally beautiful catalogue. In the thematic index of Klee's titles suggestion of a tree, the concentration of growth in the possible

33 compiled by the Klee Foundation, the most frequent natural sub- development of fruit with potentialities for further growth.

jects are "flower, flora, blossom, and blooming" (194 instances), When we turn to Klee's Notebooks, we make a great dis-

covery. An image of Park near Lu[cerne] is placed in volume

two near the end of a section of paintings and drawings titled

"Evolution of a theme: Trees as rendered by Klee from his youth

29 Merleau-Ponty, Eye and Mind, 129; L'oeil et Tesprit, 31 . "II faut d'abord une 34 to maturity." FHere find collection of twenty-four paintings grande accoutumance du monde visible pour arriver a le desintegrer, a voir we a

son ame, a voir ce quie se cache a I'interieur. Par exemple, dans une foret,

j'ai senti a plusieurs reprises que ce n'etait pas moi qui regardais la foret.

J'ai senti, certains jours, que c'etaient les arbres qui me regardaient, qui me 31 Cf. Richard Verdi, Klee and Nature (New York: Rizzoli International

parlaient. Moi, j'etais la...ecoutant. Ce n'etait pas moi qui regardais I'arbre. Publications, 1984), 243n78. C'est I'arbre qui me regardait" (Georges Charbonnier, Le Monologue du 32 Grohmann, Paul Klee, 379.

peinfre [Paris: R. Julliard, 1959], 143). 33 Cf. David Burnett, "Paul Klee: The Romantic Landscape," Art Journal 36, 30 Michael Baumgartner and Marianne Keller, eds., In Paul Klee's Enchanted no. 4 (Summer 1977): 326. Garden, exh. cat. (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2008). 34 Klee, The Nature of Nature, 63-79. or drawings of trees stretching across Klee's career spanning the to live with the vines and undergrowth of everyday appearances,

years from 1896 to 1940. They include the well-known water- but "our own pounding heart drives us downward, down deep 38 color, Fig Tree ( Feigenbaumj (1929; fig. 2); the geometric and to the primal ground." "Ways of Studying Nature" continues

divisionist, yet moving oil painting, Lone Fir Tree ( einsame Tanne), to say that today's artist recognizes his place in the cosmos and

1932; and the watercolor, Young Tree (Chloranthemum) junger seeks a "sense of totality" that goes beyond the outer appear- (

Baum [Chloranthemum]), 1932, which anticipates and is quite ance in a visible penetration to the "inner being" of things. Klee

similar to the pen and paper drawing in this exhibition, Little Tree mentions three ways in which this is done. First, there is a dissec-

( Baumchenj (1935; plate 9). In this evolution of tree drawings, tion of the inside through planar sections as "anatomy becomes

it is striking that Klee's early tree portraits from 1896 to 1912 physiology." Human, animal, and plant anatomies are sciences

are quite representational and realist, achieving depth through of the observable structures of organisms, observable with the

the techniques of traditional perspective drawing and painting. unaided eye or with the microscope, and surface anatomy stud-

There were many more from this period that are similar: Untitled ies the structures that can readily be seen on the contours or sur-

( Landscape with Pond ( Ohne Titel [ Landschaft m it Teich faces of the body. Physiology studies the organs, cells, molecules, ) ]),

Untitled ( Single Tree on a Hill ( Ohne Titel [Einzigen and their biochemistry that enables a bodily organism to live and 1895/71; )

Baum auf einem Huge/]), 1895/73; and Untitled [Grassy Slope function. If the impressionists were good anatomists, Klee seeks

Seen through Trees) ( Ohne Titel [ Wiesenhang durch Baume from the modern artist a more physiological study of nature. In

gesehen]), c. 1898/117. Then we encounter a chronological addition to study of the "inside," there is also the "non-optical

gap from 1912 to 1929 in the evolution of tree works presented way of intimate physical contact" that Klee says reaches the eye

in the Notebooks, after which we are greeted with a multiplicity of the artist "from below," earthbound. Klee increasingly felt as

of abstract tree portraits stretching from 1929 to 1940 and com- his art unfolded and matured that the aesthetic act emerges from

posed of lines, more or less geometric, more or less narrow or a depth that is an affective desire, for which he did not hesitate

broad, some straight, some curving. Park near /.u[cerne] comes to use the word "unconscious." Finally, there is the "non-optical

near the end of these and is composed of a mid-range of heavy contact through the cosmic bond that descends from above." 35 lines and colored forms. In Klee's maturity, we might ask, why In this third way, the artist rises toward a "metaphysical view of

did he find abstraction more conducive and even "truer" to his the world" and is able to "form free abstract structures which

emerging concept of nature? surpass schematic intention and achieve a new naturalness, the 39 In the intervening gap in the tree works from 1912 to 1929, naturalness of the work." Klee illustrates the inner way of nature we find three of Klee's major theoretical statements on art as well study through planar dissection by a cross-sectional line drawing

the majority of his years at the Bauhaus school from 1921 titled Landscapely-physiognomic landschaftlich-physiognomish as ( ),

to 1931, in Weimar from 1921 to 1925, then in Dessau. From 1931, in which the combination of all three ways are shown with

these years of Klee's pedagogical research come the two vol- a schematic diagram showing the eye of the artist in circular con-

umes of the Notebooks. In volume one, The Thinking Eye, we tact with all three realms, with the appearances of things (optical-

find Klee's "Ways of Studying Nature" (1919-23), "Creative physical way), with the depth of earth below (non-optical way),

Credo" (1918), and the Jena lecture (January 26, 1924) titled and with the world above (metaphysical way).

"On Modern Art." These texts reveal a decisive shift in Klee's Intervening right in the middle of "Ways of Studying Nature"

thinking and art. in the Notebooks is a line study of leaf and tree, utterly striking

"Ways of Studying Nature" begins with the famous statement for its simplicity in displaying the complementary effects of inner

that "for the artist, dialogue with nature remains a conditio sine leaf ribs or veins and outer leaf forms. Moving from left to right

qua non. The artist is a man, himself nature and a part of nature on three different rows of leaf drawings, Klee demonstrates how 36 in natural space." The essay quickly marks several distinctions the same inner linear vein structure can appear to the eye quite

between ways to study nature. It was "yesterday's artistic creed" differently in different outward leaf shapes. The outer variations

to engage in what Klee calls the "painfully precise investigation in leaf shape catch the eye and one must take a "second look"

of appearance." Following this way, excellent pictures were to realize that each outer leaf shape retains the same inner vein-

obtained of the object's surface filtered by the air. Klee refers to ing pattern. For Klee, a tense relationship like an "argument"

this as the "art of optical sight," and we must presume that Klee's exists between energy, which is expressed by the inner linear

early studies of nature and his early paintings of trees fall under this patterning, and shape or mass, which is the extended outer form.

category and this shortcoming. "The artist of today," he writes, "is Klee writes: "Our concept of the veins as constructive, articulat-

more than an improved camera; he is more complex, richer, and ing forces entails thinking of the evolution of a leaf (in the picto- 37 wider." In "On Modern Art" Klee names the impressionists as rial sense) as an argument between linear force or peculiarity 40 our "antipodes of yesteryear" and says they were perfectly right and the two-dimensional massiveness or multiplicity." The leaf

drawings also demonstrate that the same inner line structure can

35 Ibid., 73.

36 Klee, "Ways of Studying Nature," in The Thinking Eye, 63. German 38 Paul Klee, "On Modern Art," (in this volume) 14. German original: Uber die

original: Wege des Naturstudiums, first printed in Staatliches Bauhaus moderne Kunst (Bern: Benteli, 1945). Weimar, 1919-1923. 39 Klee, "Ways of Studying Nature," 66-67. 37 Klee, "Ways of Studying Nature," 63. 40 Klee, The Nature of Nature, 5. results when the flow of sap is equally distributed, a 'transitional

form,' and a 'hybrid form,' such as a maple leaf, whose contours

are 'produced' and fundamentally determined by the strength of 44 their energy, causing individual inner forms to emerge." Klee's

argument for the oval leaf as archetype or Urform indicates

Klee's affinity with romanticism and the morphology of Goethe's

model of a metaphysical Urpflanze, which is the unitary source

for the variation of plant forms as a totality. Goethe's scientific

writings included his study The Metamorphosis of Plants (1790)

as well as his Theory of Colors (1810) disputing Newton's color

optics. Goethe limited his botanical study to flowering plants and,

in particular, annual grasses, and his central insight is that all

the organs along the length of a shoot can be traced back to a

single, underlying form—"everything is leaf." As Adolf Portmann

summarizes: "Goethe marshals an abundance of evidence show-

ing the transformations of the foliage leaf, transitional forms

between foliage leaf and corolla, between corolla and stamens—

all evidence pointing to the metamorphosis of a single, unified, 45 fundamental form." Baumgartner cites two sources that indicate

Klee's awareness and interest in Goethe's morphology, the first,

his attendance at a lecture by Rudolf Steiner in 1918 which was

a detailed exposition of Goethe's theory of metamorphosis, and

the second, a letter from Klee to Katherine S. Dreier, October 21,

1922, in which Klee speaks of their common interest in Goethe's 46 "archetypal plant."

Merleau-Ponty was also evidently aware of the Goethe mor- flf). {*-4 4 6 /.ft

phological thesis, for in the Nature course in which he discusses

metamorphosis, he cites a text on the unity of flower and leaf from Fig. 3: Paul Klee, Illuminated Leaf [belichtetes Blatf), 1929/274. Teilhard de Chardin, which agrees with Goethe's main insight Watercolor and pen on paper on cardboard, 30.9 x 23 cm, Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern. but makes an important qualification. Merleau-Ponty cites this text from Chardin: "In a flower, the parts of the calyxes, the sepals, equally be both leaf as it can be the whole tree. The first line the petals, the stamens, and pistil are not leaves. They have prob- drawing on each row, which is the inner leaf pattern, can be rec- ably never been leaves. But they carry in their attachments and ognized equally as a line drawing of the trunk and branching of in their texture all that would have given a leaf if they were not 47 a tree. Klee's fantastic Illuminated Leaf [belichtetes Blatf of 1929 formed under an influence and with a new destiny." Though )

(fig. 3) shows the same repetition between inner leaf veining and Merleau-Ponty objects to Goethe's morphology as "idealist" for 48 tree branching. In these repetitions, inner and outer, parts and its conception of "transcendent finality," the thesis that all of wholes, are each rendered visible and form an inextricable rela- plant nature is leaf settled down into Merleau-Ponty's thinking tionship. Each refers to the other. Grohmann wrote: "In the small-

41 est leaf, analogies to the whole law are exactly reproduced." 44 Michael Baumgartner, '"Reducing the contingent to its essence': Paul Klee's

Klee himself wrote in 1923: "A leaf is part of the whole. If the Dialogue with Nature," in In Paul Klee's Enchanted Garden, 30. 45 Portmann, "Goethe and the Concept of Metamorphosis," 135. tree is an organism, the leaf is an organ. The small parts of the

46 Baumgartner, "Reducing the contingent to its essence," 27. whole are again articulated in themselves.... The articulation of 47 Merleau-Ponty, Nature, 267-68; La Nature, 339-40. Cf. Teilard de the whole is defined by roots, trunk and crown. The articulation Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, 179. 44 48 Merleau-Ponty, Nature, 244; La Nature, 309. Discussion of Goethe by Mer- of a leaf is defined by stem, veins, and leaf tissue." The tree is, leau-Ponty is extremely rare and what we have is cryptic. One linkage be- thus, a metamorphosis of leaf. tween Merleau-Ponty and Goethe would have been Merleau-Ponty's intense

Klee created his own taxonomy or typology of outer leaf study of Schelling, which appears extensively in the first Nature lecture course (1956-57), "Chapter Four: The Romantic Conception of Nature." Near the forms as different energetic shapes. He argued for three principal end of "The Philosopher and his Shadow," Merleau-Ponty argues phenom- types and writes: "Thus we may distinguish an archetype (oval), a enology must incorporate natural being, the "barbarous" source Schelling 43 transitional form and a composite form." These are elaborated spoke of (Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary [Evan- ston: Northwestern University Press, 1964], 178. French original: Signes [Paris: by Baumgartner: "an oval 'Urform,' or 'original form,' which Gallimard, 1960], 225). Schelling's philosophy of nature crucially influenced

Goethe and the two were close friends who entered into direct dialogue on

the concept of nature and metamorphosis. Cf. Robert J. Richards, "Chapter

41 Grohmann, Paul Klee, 192. Eight: Schelling's Dynamic Evolutionism," in The Romantic Conception of Life:

42 Klee, The Nature of Nature, 13. Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe (Chicago: University of Chicago

43 Ibid., 17. Press, 2002). —

sufficiently that he began the third Nature lecture course with It is necessary to stress that the archetypal leaf form together

this statement of his philosophical project: "To study Nature as with all three leaf patterns drawn by Klee are not observational

a leaf of Being = as part of this complex which reveals all of it.... drawings that Klee made of particular leaves from nature, rather

Nature as a 'leaf' of Being, and the problems of philosophy are they are imaginary leaf "essences" formed on the basis of rules 49 concentric." The metaphor of the leaf carried forward right into or laws regarding leaf formation. Likewise, Little Tree (plate 9)

The Visible and the Invisible where Merleau-Ponty adopted it to in the present exhibition, is not an observational drawing of any

describe both the human body as an exemplar of the flesh of particular tree like an oak or maple, rather it is a tree-like con-

the world itself, that fundamental ontological element and rela- struction depicting interlocking lines of energy in a tree's leaf

tion. He wrote, for example: "The openness through flesh: the structure. For Tuesday, October 30, 1923, Klee assigned the

two leaves of my body and the leaves of the visible world. ..it following exercise for his Bauhaus students: "Imaginary leaves 50 is between these intercalated leaves that there is visibility." Or on the basis of the foregoing insight into basic rules. A free geo- 56 again, he wrote: "When we speak of the flesh of the visible. ..we metric-aesthetic effort." Just previously, he had entered into an

mean that carnal being, as a being of depths, of several leaves extensive study of "angle progression and angle regression" in 57 or several faces, a being in latency, and a presentation of a cer- palm fan leaves that he titled "the truth about palm-leaf fans."

51 tain absence, is a prototype of Being." In a Working Note of Richard Verdi reports an instance in which Klee requested his

March 1960, we again find the concept of the world as a "leaf Bauhaus pupils to draw the form of a leaf: "Pacing slowly up 52 of Being." And in a remarkable Working Note from November and down, Klee said a few words, softly and with long pauses;

1960, he wrote of the human body's reflexivity, in other words its thereupon all of us felt that we had never before seen a leaf, or

sensible capacity to be both touching and touched, in terms of an rather the leaf, the essence of the leaf.... We had to admit that

inferiority and exteriority that is an "internal leaf with an external the first thing we had to do was to learn to see before we could 53 58 leaf, their folding back on one another." The body opens onto draw another line." In his color theory, Klee also sought for

a "cosmology of the visible, in the sense that, considering endo- rules, rigor, and totality, developing a "canon of color totality"

time and endospace, for me it is no longer a question of origins, created by circles, triangles, and proportions to express logically

nor limits, nor of a series of events going to a first cause, but one the color relationships of the color wheel as true and false pairs, 54 59 sole explosion of Being which is forever." It would be distract- complements, oppositions, balance, and equilibrium.

ing here to enter into a full account of Merleau-Ponty's ontology Klee's stress upon the imaginary and formal essence as

of the flesh of the world, but it is important to see how thoroughly revealed by geometrical angles, the laws of color, and planimet-

the thesis that "all is leaf" plays a critical role in his mature onto- ric construction by the artist is entirely consistent with one par-

logical vocabulary and thinking. ticular stress in the "Credo," namely upon formal elements and

American romantic philosopher Henry David Thoreau not the artist's effort to construct a "formal cosmos" that is like the

only knew and studied Goethe's morphology of plants, he also Creation itself. This is Klee's declaration against representation

did not hesitate to extend the thesis that "all is leaf" to the entire of appearances in favor of "rendering visible," formalism, and

natural order, including human beings. In the "Spring" chapter the specific meaning he sought to give to abstraction: "Abstract

from Walden, Thoreau imagines himself standing in the labora- formal elements are put together like numbers and letters to make tory of the "Artist who made the world and me" and discovers the concrete beings or abstract things; in the end a formal cosmos is

"overhanging leaf" as the "prototype" of the natural world. "You achieved, so much like the Creation that a mere breath suffices to 60 thus find in the very sands an anticipation of the vegetable leaf.... transform religion into act." The formal rigor Klee is requiring of

The feathers and wings of birds are still drier and thinner leaves.... his modern artist leads on to what Klee means by abstraction. "To

Even ice begins with delicate crystal leaves.... The whole tree be an abstract painter," Klee writes, "does not mean to abstract

61 itself is but one leaf, and rivers are still vaster leaves." From these from naturally occurring opportunities for comparison." Thus,

leaf forms of nature, Thoreau turned to the human body: "Is not abstraction, for Klee, is not like a process of empirical observation

the hand a spreading palm leaf with its lobes and veins. The ear and logic of induction, as he says, observational comparisons of

may be regarded, fancifully, as a lichen, umbilicaria, on the side a woman, a cat, a flower, an egg, or a cube. Neither is abstrac-

of the head, with its lobe or drop." He concludes powerfully, that tion what it was for an artist such as Willem de Kooning, an art of

"the Maker of this earth but patented a leaf.... The earth is living fragmentation, overlapping pieces, jumbled calligraphic forms,

poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flower and fruit a head-like shape here, a bone-like shape there. De Kooning's 55 not a fossil earth, but a living earth." was an aesthetic of "glimpses," of splashing colors and streak-

49 Merleau-Ponty, Nature, 205, 204; La Nature, 266, 265. Boston: Beacon Press, 1997), 286-89.

50 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis 56 Klee, The Nature of Nature, 22, 23.

(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 131. French original: Le 57 Ibid., 19-20.

visible et /'invisible (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 173. 58 Verdi, Klee and Nature, 24-25. Also cf. Richard Verdi, "Botanical Imagery

51 Ibid., 136; 179. in the Art of Klee," in Paul Klee: Dialogue with Nature, ed. Ernst-Gerhard

52 Ibid., 242; 295. Guse (Munich: Prestel, 1991), 28-29.

53 Ibid., 265; 318. 59 Klee, The Thinking Eye, 467-511. 54 Ibid. 60 Klee, "Creative Credo," 78, 79.

1 55 The citations of Henry David Thoreau are from "Spring," in Walden ( 854; 61 Klee, "Ways of Studying Nature," 72. ing shapes comparable to ancient Greek poetic fragments or the into the air of the sky. By the tree WATER climbs to meet light. Of 62 poetic fragments of language found in one like Ezra Pound. a few salts in the earth WATER constructs a body that is in love

Rather, for Klee, to abstract means "to distil pure pictorial rela- with the day, to the whole universe stretching and outstretching 68 tions: light to dark, color to light and dark, color to color, long liquid powerful arms that end in gentle hands." to short, broad to narrow, sharp to dull, left-right, above-below, Yet Klee's parable takes another turn in distinguishing the being-in front, circle to square to triangle. In regard to the ques- human artist from the tree of Nature or tree of life, different from tion, 'Abstract?' the treatment of direction is crucial. If you set the being a purely naturalistic creator like the Artist Creator of the 63 yellow forward and the blue back, then that is abstract." Klee universe. The crown of the tree is not a mere mirror of what is adds that the pictorial outcome of a cat or dog is not to be con- going on in the roots for the work of the artist intervenes. Klee demned if it emerges from pure pictorial elements. In a moment writes: "It would not occur to anyone to demand of the tree that it of humor or even sarcasm, Klee describes an abstract artist who shape its crown exactly like its root structure. Everyone will under- is bending every effort to group the formal elements— line, form, stand that the below and the above cannot mirror one another color— purely and logically when a layman, looking over his perfectly. It is clear that over time the different functions in the shoulder, utters the devastating words: "'But that doesn't look like various elemental realms will diverge from one another in quite 69 Uncle Fred at all!' The artist, if his nerves are well-steeled, thinks, vital ways." Some people, Klee asserts, would like to deny the

'To hell with Uncle Fred, I've got to keep working on this, I need artist the deviations his art demands and even accuse the artist of 64 to add some building blocks...'" incompetence or deliberate distortion. For Klee, the artist's posi-

In "Creative Credo," Klee offers several examples of what the tion with respect to nature is analytical and quite like scientific modern abstract seeks to render visible. One is the experience work, which, as Baumgartner puts it, "reveals insights into the of a modern man as he walks across the deck of a steamer com- genesis and structure of objects that are not accessible to the 70 pared with how a man of antiquity would be represented sailing superficial gaze." Richard Verdi concurs: "The role which Klee a boat, another is a man sleeping as an interplay of functions, envisions for the artist is in many respects that of a disinterested

71 united in rest. The third is a word picture of how the abstract artist purveyor of truth—of a philosopher or a scientist." The artist con- presents a tree: "An apple tree in blossom, the roots, the rising siders the dimensions of an object in a new light, and if what he sap, the trunk, a cross section with annual rings, the blossom, its arrives at seems to be a "distortion" of natural forms, Klee states: structure, its sexual functions, the fruit, the core and seeds. An "He does not feel so bound by these realities, because he does 65 interplay of states of growth." not see in these culminating forms the essence of the creative pro-

The religious analogy between the artist and the Creator that cess of nature. More important to him than the culminating forms 72 Klee asserts based upon the construction of a formal cosmos are the formative forces." Nature is unfinished, it is in genesis should be somewhat qualified, for Klee develops a parable of and metamorphosis, on the way. "Nothinq should be done head- the tree in the lecture "On Modern Art" in which the artist is distin- long," Klee soys, "i, has ,o grow, has ,o mature, and if some day 73 guished from nature. There is a sense in which the artist himself is the time is ripe for such a work, so much the better!." a tree, according to Klee, more specifically, the artist is the trunk Thus, Klee's philosophy of picture-making displays a romanti- of the tree: "from that structure juices flow upward to the artist, cism that searches for the unity and totality in all things going 66 passing through him, through his eye." The artwork is the crown back to Goethe's morphology and thesis, "all is leaf," combined of the tree, visible on all sides, unfolding in space and time. In this with a formalism embodied in Klee's rigorous and systematic way, art expresses nature for the artist has a "modest position" study of line, form, and color as an abstract language of pure pic- in relation to the natural forces that flow through him into the art- torial relations. Yet to leave his worldview here would be to miss work. "And yet, in the place that has been assigned to him, at the the "heart" of what Klee is doing, all of its affect, latent desire, trunk, he is doing no more than gathering and conducting what- and feeling. It would attribute to Klee a "cold romanticism" that ever it is that comes to him from the depths.... And the beauty of is detached, rationalistic, and formal—the creation of images in the crown is not he himself, but what has merely passed through which emotion is not allowed utterance. This would contradict the 67 him." This aspect of Klee's parable of the tree is captured quite substance of so many moving works, particularly many near the beautifully by Paul Valery in a short fragment of a poem titled "In end of his career, including the angel drawings, Kettledrummer

Praise of Water": "Consider a plant, regard a mighty tree, and ( Paukenspieler and the Untitled [Last Still Life ( Ohne Titel ), 1940, ) you will discern that it is none other than an upright river pouring [letzten Stillleben]}, 1940, to name but a few. Rather, in a diary

entry from 1914 while Klee was in Tunisia, he spoke of a "new

romanticism": "Ingres is said to have ordered the motionless; I 62 Cf. Thomas B. Hess, Abstract Painting: Background and American Phase

(New York: Viking Press, 1951). Cited in Jed Perl, New Art City (New

York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 116. Cf. Willem de Kooning, "Content is

a Glimpse," in The Collected Writings of Willem de Kooning (Madras: 68 Paul Valery, The Collected Works of Paul Valery: Poems in the Rough, trans.

Hanuman Books, 1988), 67-98, esp. 82-83. Hilary Corke, vol. 2 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 10. 63 Klee, "Ways of Studying Nature," 72. 69 Klee, "On Modern Art," 10.

64 Klee, "On Modern Art," 12. 70 Baumgartner, "Reducing the contingent to its essence," 29. 65 Klee, "Creative Credo," 79. 71 Verdi, Klee and Nature, 28. 66 Klee, "On Modern Art," 10. 72 Klee, "On Modern Art," 13.

67 Ibid. 73 Ibid., 14. 74 want to go beyond pathos and order motion." A few entries spark, closing the circle whence it came: back into the eye and

81 later he ascribed to his style of abstraction a "cool romanticism": farther." Citing this very text, Merleau-Ponty wrote about the

"One deserts the realm of the here and now to transfer one's artist in Eye and Mind: "In the immemorial depth of the visible,

activity into a realm of the yonder where total affirmation is something has moved, caught fire, which engulfs his body; every-

possible. Abstraction. The cool romanticism of this style without thing he paints is an answer to this incitement, and his hand is

75 82 pathos is unheard of." In both of these entries, it is striking that 'nothing but the instrument of a distant will.'" In La philosophie

Klee dissociates his art from "pathos," but this is not a dissocia- aujourd'hui, Merleau-Ponty cites at length Klee's 1924 Jena lec-

tion from emotion and yearning; pathe are the passions and, as ture in which Klee says that the artist "is perhaps, without really

83 such, are forms of suffering. Mozart, Klee says, took refuge in the wanting to be, a philosopher." Merleau-Ponty quotes the follow-

joyous side of the world, for the most part. Klee identifies with ing text: "Who as an artist would not want [des/rera/f] to dwell

Mozart, yet says that because his own heart that beats for the there? In the womb of nature, in the primal ground of Creation, 84 world seems mortally wounded, his art produces forms that are which holds the secret key to everything that is?"

"impure crystals": "In the great pit of forms lie broken fragments How can one reconcile the formal and rigorous side of Klee's

to some of which we still cling. They provide abstraction with its romanticism and picture making with his apparently equal stress

material. A junkyard of unauthentic elements for the creation of upon the artist's experience and expression of primordial depth, 76 impure crystals." desire, yearning, and passivity? To pose this question is part of

In a telling and lengthy entry from 1918 near the end of the riddle of Klee and to seek its solution we could well return to

Klee's Diaries, Klee compares himself with fellow artist and close leaves, trees, and nature. For leaves are not only rules, they are

friend, Franz Marc, who "is more human, he loves more warmly, rhythms. Nature is not only algorithms, Nature is harmonies and

is more demonstrative. He responds to animals as if they were melodies. Klee's reference to Mozart is significant. To understand 77 human." For himself, he does not love animals and all creatures his new, cool romanticism, we should follow the musical elements with "an earthly warmth": "I tend to dissolve into the whole of in Klee's picture theory and picture making. The topic is neces-

creation. ..the earth-idea gives way to the world-idea. My love is sary though it is vast and we can make only a start here. 78 distant and religious." Klee sums up with a mysterious sentence

that mirrors a theme from his tomb's epitaph: "My fire is more 79 like that of the dead or of the unborn." This could mean many METAMORPHOSIS AND MUSICAL

things, but in its context, I take it this means that the love Klee feels PAINTING: COOL ROMANTICISM

for nature and puts into his art is more universal and cosmic, not Metamorphosis is not only a biological term and real-

the love by one individual for another particular individual, but ity, it is also a poetic term and a musical term. Ovid wrote The

the love that is like the attraction of magnetic poles, the energy Metamorphoses recounting the transformations in the play of

and desire to be born, equally the sacrifice and submission of emotional extremes and illogical, conflicting impulses, in the

dying. In terms of Plato's Symposium, Klee is not Alcibiades with relations among mortals and gods in the ancient Greek myths.

his inebriated and suffering passion for the singular Socrates that Kafka wrote another Metamorphosis ( Die Verwandlungj recount-

is driving him mad, Klee is more like Eryximachus, the medical ing the tragic transformations that occurred in the life of Gregor

doctor who praised Love for its occurrence everywhere in the uni- Samsa together with his family, his father, mother, and dear sis-

verse, in plants, in animals, in humans, and in the movements of ter, Grete who betrayed him, when "he woke one morning from

the heavenly bodies. To Eryximachus, both medicine and music troubled dreams and found himself transformed in his bed into 85 are sciences of the "effects of Love on rhythm and harmony.... a monstrous insect [Ungez/efer]." Phillip Glass composed the

This is the honorable, heavenly species of Love, produced by the incidental music for two separate theater productions of Kafka's 80 melodies of Urania, the Heavenly Muse." story that were subsequently incorporated into a five-part piece

Indeed, the warmer elements in Klee's picture theory caught for solo piano titled Metamorphosis. Klee maintained a lifelong

the attention and admiration of Merleau-Ponty. From Klee's love for music. "Music, for me," he wrote, "is a love bewitched.... 86 "Creative Credo," Merleau-Ponty emphasized the elements of I have always been on good terms only with music." Klee grew

spark and fire. Klee wrote: "A certain fire flares up; it is conducted up with parents who both were musicians and his father was

through the hand, flows to the picture and there bursts into a a professor of music who specialized in teaching voice, Klee 87 himself was a violinist, and he married Lily Stumpf, a pianist.

74 Paul Klee, The Diaries of Paul Klee, 1898- 1918, ed. Felix Klee (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964), #941. German original: Paul Klee, 81 Klee, "Creative Credo," 78.

Tagebucher von Paul Klee, 1898-1918, ed. Felix Klee (Cologne: M. 82 Merleau-Ponty, Eye and Mind, 147; L'oeil et Tesprit, 86. DuMont Schauberg, 1957). 83 Klee, "On Modern Art," 13.

75 Ibid., #951. 84 Ibid., 14. Cited by Merleau-Ponty in La philosophie aujourd'hui, in Notes de

76 Ibid. cours, 56n4.

77 Ibid., #1008. 85 Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis, in The Metamorphosis and Other Stories,

78 Ibid. trans. Malcolm Pasley (New York: Penguin Books, 1992), 64.

79 Ibid. 86 Klee, Diaries, #67, #152. 80 Plato, Symposium, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff 87 By the time young Paul Klee was eleven years old, he was a good enough

(Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989), 187c, 187e. violinist to play as an extra with the Bern symphony and eventually be a -

a consummate blend of music and painting. 89

Indeed, it was both polyphony and pictorial rhythm that 94 entered most deeply into Klee's aesthetic thinking and picture making, derived from his love for the early eighteenth-century

works of Bach and Mozart. "Mozart and Bach are more mod-

ern than the nineteenth century," Klee wrote. "Polyphonic paint-

ing is superior to music in that, here, the time element becomes

a spatial element. The notion of simultaneity stands out even 90 more richly." Polyphonic Architecture polyphone Architektur), (

1930, found in the exhibition here (plate 62) presents overlapping "voices" of color planes from the cooler red-pink colors

and dark framing planes along the perimeter into the center's

warmly "singing" orange. And there, at the center, we find a

gently floating architectural drawing composed like the lines of

a musical score Andrew Kagan has suggested that perhaps Klee

was envisioning an opera house such as we find in other "oper-

atic" paintings. The overall effect of the picture is the presentation

of musical-theatrical polyphony and Kagan has written that it is

Klee's "very finest performance among his small-scale combina-

91 tions of polyphonic color and line."

We find an example of what Klee means by pictorial transla-

tion of music in volume one of the pedagogical Notebooks. It is

the translation of a sonata for piano and violin by J. S. Bach, no.

6 in G Major, consisting of a three-part passage, or polyphony in

three lines or voices, and Klee executes the musical theme pictori-

ally for each of the voices for each bar or measure. Each voice is

represented first by a quantitative length of line corresponding to

short lines for the quick sixteenth, thirty-second, and sixty-fourth

notes in the upper registers and longer lines for the more sustain-

ing eighth and quarter notes in the lower register. Each of the

Fig. 4: Paul Klee, Kettledrummer Paukenspieler ), 1940/270. Colored ( lines is then interpreted qualitatively as a certain thinness or thick- paste on paper on cardboard, 34.6 x 21.2 cm, Zentrum Paul Klee, ness to represent the dynamic of each voice, whether soft or loud. Bern. Finally, crescendos and decrescendos appear as the increasing

Thus, it is not surprising that Klee studied deeply the interrela- and decreasing angles of each of the lines, an opening angle to

tions between painting and music and produced the most musi- express increasing volume and a closing one to express diminish-

cal paintings of the twentieth century. 88 Sometimes Klee painted ing volume. 92

musicians: pianists, singers, harpists, kettledrummers. Sometimes As examples of Klee's approach, we might consider Fugue

he incorporated elements of musical notation: notes, staffs, key in Red ( Fuge in Rotj, or Heroic Strokes of the Bow her 1921, (

signatures, and the fermata. More often he deployed the struc- oische Bogenstriche ), 1938, also sometimes translated as Heroic

tural elements of music as pictorial elements in his paintings: tone, Fiddling. Fugue in Red is a watercolor that vibrates or reverberates

harmony, sonority, polyphony, and rhythm, above all, pictorial

89 The theme of music and painting in Klee has a long history in both the rhythm. Klee painted Kettledrummer (fig. 4) in the last year of

academic and art worlds. It has been the subject of full-length books his life and it brings together all of his accumulated mastery of by Andrew Kagan in the 1980s and Hajo Duchting in the 1990s, and

color, line, and depth. It is a broad-brush, red, orange, and black Klee was included in a mid-1980s Stuttgart exhibition that engaged in a

comprehensive survey of the relations between music and the visual arts abstraction of the arms and face of a tympanist performing the in the twentieth century. The theme was also the subject of a stand-alone crashing notes of the kettledrums at the end of Mozart's Requiem, exhibition titled Klee et la mus/que at the Pompidou Center in Paris in

1985-86, and the Zentrum Paul Klee organized an exhibition titled Paul

Klee—Melody and Rhythm in 2006-07. The composer, Gunther Schuller,

second violinist with the City of Bern Orchestra. The woman he married, has created a symphonic work for full orchestra titled Seven Studies on

Lily Stumpf, was a pianist who supported the family by giving piano lessons Themes of Paul Klee (1959) offering musical interpretations in separate

while Paul struggled to master painting in their early years together. Cf. movements for seven Klee paintings including The Twittering Machine ( Die

Andrew Kagan, Paul Klee: Art and Music (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, Zwitscher-Maschine) Abstract Trio ( Abstractes Terzett (1922), ) (1923),

20-21. and the monumental Ancient Harmony ( Alter Klang Cf. Gunther 1983), ) (1927).

88 The celebrated musicality of Klee's art is one of the qualities that has most Schuller, Seven Studies on Themes of Paul Klee (London: Universal Edition,

captured the imagination of the public (Kagan, Paul Klee, 21). Gilles 1962).

Deleuze has stated that Klee is the most musicianly of painters (Deleuze, 90 Klee, Dianes, #1081.

A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi [Minneapolis: University of 91 Kagan, Paul Klee, 117. Minnesota Press, 1987], 303). 92 Klee, The Thinking Eye, 285-87. as gradual changes in color ranging from pink to violet spread

across the work arranged as on four staffs, repeated like the full

steps and half steps of a chromatic musical scale. Heroic Strokes 93 of the Bow, painted as an homage to great violin playing,

presents a background of deep blue approaching violet against which appear in black the down-strokes of the violin bow in vary-

ing thicknesses to express dynamic energy and volume from very

soft pianissimo to very loud fortissimo ). Other musical elements ( ) (

take their place alongside the flying bow. We find a repetition

and variation on many of these elements in the work from the

same year titled The Gray Man and the Coast ( der Graue und

die Kuste). In the exhibition here are many works that similarly

incorporate musical elements: Musical Ghost ( Musikalisches

Gespenst plate From Gliding to Rising (von Gleiten ) (1940; 38),

1 zu Steigen) ( 1923; plate 8), and the lovely Scherzo with Thirteen

(Das Scherzo m it der Dreizehn plate 37). ) (1922;

Such works as these play on pictorial rhythm and the analogies

between the formal elements of music and those of painting. Klee writes that, "this choice of the formal elements and the mode of their mutual binding, which is limited to a very small range, is analo-

94 gous to the musical thought between motif and theme." Some

of these analogies might include the line, which is also a melody,

thickness of line that is weight or dynamic ranging from the pianis-

simo to the double forte, and arrows of varying length and angles

that are crescendos and decrescendos. Color is musical intonation,

whether sweet and gentle or harsh and edgy. In painting, there is Fig. 5: Paul Klee, The Twittering Machine (Die Zwitscher-Maschine color harmony, contrast, and opposition just as in music there is ),

1922/151 . Oil transfer drawing, watercolor, and ink on paper with harmony in the chords and counterpoint in the voices. gouache and ink borders on board, 64.1 x 48.3 cm, The Museum of Now to come directly to our point about metamorphosis and Modern Art, NY, Purchase, 564.1939.

music, to speak of nature and art in terms of formal rules is to cast 96 Nature as a natural "order," exemplified in the great astronomi- freedom without transgressing the law." The artist is "led to the

cal regularities governed by rules or laws that compel the same upper ways by yearning to free ourselves from earthly bonds; by

event or pattern in all instances and under all circumstances. This swimming and flying, we free ourselves from constraint in pure 97 amounts to nothing more than a mechanical reproduction under mobility." Adolf Portmann has captured this blending of rules

the compulsion of a formula that does not allow for spontaneity, and rhythms in his concept of metamorphosis: "The growth of

variation, and creativity in nature. There must be something within the plant from seed to seed stands before us in an exemplary

the repetition that magnetizes and focuses our attention, some fashion in the annual flowering plant, and enables us to form an

element of life and variation that bestows upon the duplication idea of the inner law governing formation: in the course of the

a difference of quality or rhythm that exceeds sheer quantita- development of the axis of a shoot, lateral appendages follow 98 tive sameness, which would be lifeless and dull. Nature exceeds rhythmically according to definite rules."

mere natural order, for nature is filled with endless variation Thus, when Klee spoke of the "Canon of Color Totality," the

and differences even within the order to which it is compelled. term "canon" is to be understood, not only as a general principle

Within the rules are found a variety of rhythms, and within the or rule, which it is, but Klee also meant the word "canon" musi-

rhythms are deviations. Klee says that, "rhythms in nature become cally, as in Pachelbel's well-known Canon in D Major. Klee wrote

truly individual in the figurative sense when their parts take on that the "Canon of Color" "permits us to follow the three-part

a character that goes beyond the rhythmical, where there is an movement" from the three primary colors as the first voices, to 95 overlapping of planes. ..polyphonic interpenetration." He adds their complements, to the tertiary colors on the periphery. "The

that irregularity, defined as a "deviation from the constructive voices come in successively as in a canon. At each of the three

norm," such as occurs in the palm-leaf umbrella, means "greater main points one voice reaches its climax, another voice softly

begins, and a third dies away. One might call this new figure 99 the canon of totality." In a work such as Klee's The Twittering

93 Jean-Louis Ferrier tells us that it is painted as homage to Klee's friend, the

great violinist, Adolf Busch (Ferrier, Paul Klee [Paris: Finest SA/ Pierre Terrail 96 Ibid., 71.

Editions, 2001 ], 40). 97 Klee, "Ways of Studying Nature," 67. 94 Klee, "On Modern Art," 12. 98 Portmann, "Goethe and the Concept of Metamorphosis," 135. 95 Klee, The Thinking Eye, 85. 99 Klee, The Thinking Eye, 489. tern of the zebra's skin is unique to each individual zebra like

the fingerprints of the human hand. Merleau-Ponty wrote: "Life is 96 not only an organization for survival; there is in life a prodigious flourishing of forms, the utility of which is only rarely attested to

103 and that sometimes even constitutes a danger." This defense of

the aesthetic properties of nature irreducible to mechanism leads

Merleau-Ponty explicitly to revise Xavier Bichat's definition of life:

"Life is not 'the ensemble of functions that resist death,' to use

104 Bichat's expression, but rather is a power to invent the visible."

In another passage, Merleau-Ponty says "we must understand life

105 as the opening of a field of action."

We most commonly think of rhythm in a musical context as

the pacing, pulse, and sometimes syncopation of the percussion

played by the drumbeat or in the bass notes of the cello, string Fig. 6: Paul Klee, Sea-Snail King Meerschnecken-Konig 1933/279. ( ), bass, bass guitar, the bass voices of the brass, or the piano's Watercolor and oil on primed muslin on plywood, 28.4 x 42.6 cm, bass notes. In musical composition rhythm is denoted by the time Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern.

signature in a musical score— I time, § time, and 1 time. This lat-

( fig. in Machine Die Zwitscher-Maschine ) (1922; 5), the birds ter was the rhythm of the triptych that Paul Klee deployed the

attached to the mechanical crank as they sing their voices out aesthetic topography of Rhythmical Rhyth-mischesj 1930, which (

appear both humorous but also monstrous, for they are anchored sets vibrating horizontal rows of alternating fields of black, then

to the machine and cannot fly. About this, Stephen Watson has gray, then white, all painted on a background of brown, and of

captured the truth about the over-mechanization of art and nature: Rhythmical, Stricter and Freer ( rhythmisches strenger und freierj,

"As playful as the birds of The Twittering Machine might appear, also from 1930, presenting horizontal rows of alternating fields

they are equally monstrous. If they sing, they do not fly; they do of purple, black, gray, and red—four colors— but each occurring

not escape the forces of gravity. Their legs remain bound to the in groupings of three, both of these paintings thus expressing the

100 machine." Concert on the Branch ( Konzert auf dem Zweig), rhythm of the three-beat bar in ! time signature. Nevertheless,

from the previous year (plate 40) appears much the same to me. rhythm expands beyond its common musical context by leaps

In Nature, Merleau-Ponty considers the blending of the aes- and bounds, for rhythm is vibration, rhythm is movement, rhythm

thetic features of nature with adaptation by turning to the biol- is energy, rhythm is power, rhythm is Life. Rhythm is the beating

ogy of Jacob von Uexkull and Adolf Portmann among others for of the heart that reaches all the way to the pulsing in the ears,

alternative formulations of the concept of nature. In the second forehead, and other peripheries of the body: hands, fingers, feet,

lecture course "The Concept of Nature" (1957-58), on animal- and toes. Already in Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-

ity, Merleau-Ponty adopted Uexkull's account of the relationship Ponty had connected life with rhythm: "My life is made up of

between the animal and its Um welt as the playing or singing rhythms which have not their reason in what I have chosen to

of a melody. The milieu should be understood, Uexkull claims, be, but their condition in the humdrum setting which is mine. Thus

101 much more in terms of "a melody that is singing itself." For a there appears round our personal existence a margin of almost

melody, there is a relation of parts and wholes such that there impersonal existence, which can be practically taken for granted, 106 is a reciprocal influence of the notes upon one another and the and which I rely on to keep me alive." This rhythm of life in a " first note is only possible because of the last, and vice versa. The margin of almost impersonal existence" is what Merleau-Ponty

biology of Adolf Portmann asks that we attend to the exterior of names our "anonymous body" or self that keeps us alive without

the animal with its secondary qualities such as color and aes- and beyond our choosing; it is not our reason for living but our

thetic patterning. "The exterior gives the impression of a product condition for being alive. As we have remembered the pulse of

102 of art." Portmann argues this is less true in the "lower animal," the heartbeat, we now remember as well the other rhythms of our

such as the spiraled mollusk, where the richness of exterior form embodiment, rhythms of copulation, pregnancy, childbirth, and

is mechanically engendered, though Klee was able to produce the very rhythms of breathing itself.

works of great beauty such as Sea-Snail King Meerschnecken- The etymology of rhythm shows that it is a graphic variant of (

Konig ) (1933; fig. by concentrating graphic attention on the "rhyme" that occurred in the 1640s through the 1670s, and its i 6),

lines of the snail's shell, like the unfurling spiral of a blossoming meaning was originally the same as rhyme, as in a rhyming or

flower. In higher animals, the expressive capacity is greater and rhymed verse. Gradually, the meaning of rhythm expanded figu-

the body becomes a manner of expression. For example, the pat-

103 Ibid., 186; 243.

100 Stephen H. Watson, Crescent Moon over the Rational: Philosophical 104 Ibid., 190; 248.

Interpretations of Paul Klee (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 105 Ibid., 173; 227.

129-30. 106 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith

101 Merleau-Ponty, Nature, 173; La Nature, 228. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), 84. French original:

102 Ibid., 187; 244. Phenomenologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), 99. ratively within verse or poetry to include a kind of metrical movement as determined by the relation of long and short, stressed

107 and unstressed, syllables in a line .

Thus, through rhythm, it comes about that language, and metered language, takes a central position in the philosophy of nature and art. The voice of the poet is rhythm; the voice is form. The voice is also sound and, as relationships between and among sounds, voice is made melody.

In the poetry of his titles, the formal researches of his botany and biology, the lines, forms, and colors of his art, and the turn toward his own "cool" romantic philosophy, Klee became the exemplary researcher who was able to unite the poetic, scientific, artistic, and philosophical. He forged linkages among botany, biology, music, poetry, and philosophy theretofore unknown, and central to these consummate achievements was the concept of metamorphosis. All of this had a vast impact on the mature philosophy of art, philosophy of nature, and ontology of

Merleau-Ponty. This creative outpouring that we see and study in retrospect, Klee searched and researched in prospect, somewhat in the dark, searching for that light and vision. As he wrote in

"Creative Credo": "Art plays in the dark with ultimate things and

." 108 yet it reaches them

107 Cf. The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, Complete Text

Reproduced Micrographically, Volume 2: P-Z (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 636. 108 Klee, "Creative Credo," 80.

Gunter Figal Pictorial Spaces: The Art of Paul Klee

For A. M. E. S.

In thinking of the rich variety of Klee's art, recollecting the pictures once seen in museums, exhibitions, or

reproduced in books, only one conclusion seems to be appropriate: there can be no general conception of

Klee's art. There are hand-sized sheets of paper marked with only a few pencil or pen lines; watercolors with

intensely-hued traces of pigment; canvases or other cloths, some of them in layers and affixed on wooden

plates or cardboards, covered with different kinds of paint; schemes of animals, known and unknown;

human beings and angels; also irregular squares, lines in repetition, in parallel rows; and again and again

signs—arrows, letters, and numbers embedded in their surroundings. Every work is an individual, definitively

different from all others. These pictures are not representatives of a unique "style." Nevertheless they are

recognized as "Klees" at first glance.

The possibility of this recognition cannot be rooted in the very individuality of Klee's pictures. Their

distinctiveness lets them mainly be different; as individuals they are not obviously related to each other or

even assembled as a unique artistic work. They must have something in common, something unifying that

makes them different from all other individual pictures. Their commonality, however, is not obvious; it is not

immediately visible, and it does not emerge whenever the pictures are compared with each other. Some of

them may be alike, but there are no general similarities, or even family likenesses, that bind them together

in a complex net of relations. These pictures, indeed, have something in common. But what binds or holds

them together essentially is, as it seems, hidden. In recognizing a Klee one understands a source for all

these images that is not just the artist's imagination. Imagination can also produce pictures of a similar kind.

Klee himself supported such a view of his art. In the first of the lectures Klee held as a teacher at the

Bauhaus in 1921 and 1922 he describes art "in respect to the phases of its origination." He explains

origination as "Genesis," referring to the first book of the Bible and its concern with the "creation of the

world." As Klee adds, in the narrative of God's creation of the world, the world as a whole surrounding us is

1 historically structured. This is decisive. What Klee has in mind for his lectures is also a historical structuring,

but one that pertains to "working practitioners" and is therefore naturally and primarily concerned with the

2 realm of forms. Art emerges with its own forms—not with the forms that are to be discovered in the world.

1 Paul Klee, Beitrage zur bildnerischen Formenlehre [facsimile reproduction], ed. Jurgen Glaesemer (Basel: Schwabe, 1979), 13-

14: "Eine besondere Art der Analyse ist die Untersuchung des Werkes auf die Stadien seiner Entstehung hin. Diese Art bezeichne

ich mit dem Wort Genesis. Das erste Buch Moses, das sich mit der Erschaffung der Welt befasst, wird auch die Genesis genannt. Es steht da geschrieben, was Gott am ersten Tag schuf, was am zweiten und so weiter. Das uns umgebende Weltganze erfahrt eine historische Gliederung."

2 Ibid., 14: "Wir sind Bildner, werktatige Praktiker, und werden uns hier daher naturgemass auf vorzugsweise formalem Gebiet bewegen." 99 7

According to Klee even the most precise scientific knowledge of to Lessing, Klee asserts that space is also a temporal concept.

nature—of plants and animals, of the earth and its history— is of As Klee writes, it is movement that underlies every becoming,

no use if the "armamentarium" for its presentation Darstellung and it is art that brings this underlying movement to the surface. 100 ( ) 3 is lacking. Presentation, then, is not essentially oriented to some- A work of art is primarily genesis, and never is it experienced as

8 thing presentable; it does not necessarily refer to something in product.

order to let it indirectly be present. It has its own genesis, and only Klee substantiates this assumption in two respects. He points

with this genesis can it become intelligible. Accordingly, things to the process of drawing or painting and also to the process of

presentable are not merely depicted when presented—they are experiencing a picture. As Klee stresses, pictures are constructed

generated by the very genesis of presentation. Or, as Klee says in bit by bit, and in this way they are not different from houses.

his programmatic text, "Creative Credo" published in 1920, "Art Those experiencing the art will not absorb it all at once because

4 9 does not reproduce the visible, but it makes visible." This state- such contemplation needs time. Despite this, a picture cannot

ment is confirmed by a drawing from 1926, which is entitled To be reduced to its temporal character. Klee indicates this when he

10 Make Visible ( sichtbar m achenj (plate 59). A face emerges, as if calls a picture a "fixed movement" festgelegte Bewegung ). In (

it were surfacing from a scale or between steep paths. It emerges a drawing or painting the movement of a pencil or brush is as if

from the lines of the picture, just as its title, which like a headline is frozen; a line in a picture does not move. All works are what only

written next to the face, ironically underlining and abrogating the some of them are called: still lifes.

programmatic character of the drawing. There is no program for This does not refute Klee's reflections on the temporal charac-

true art, except every artwork itself is the program—the prescrip- ter of art. Though a picture is as such non-temporal, it is not abso-

tion that is immediately fulfilled by the artwork itself. lutely detached from time and from temporal experience. Rather

Klee extensively and didactically described the genesis of it opens up movement by fixing it; a fixed movement is recogniz-

pictorial forms in his Bauhaus lectures. One year before, in his able as a former movement and thus can be rediscovered. One

programmatic essay, he did the same in a more concentrated can follow a fixed line and thereby understand the movement of

and also more playful way. He imagines the genesis of the formal the artist's pencil or brush. The fixed line is like a path that can be

elements of graphic art as a journey to the "land of better cogni- taken. Or to say it in Klee's words: "There are established paths

tion," starting with the "dead point," getting to the first mobile in the artwork for the beholder's eye that scans like a grazing

11 act, namely, the line. Soon there is a stop, to take a breath, and animal." As one may add, there are not only paths but also traf-

12 the result is a line interrupted or a line structured by many stops. fic signs, like the arrows that can be found in Klee's paintings.

Then the structure of lineaments becomes more and more com- Paths, however, are always ambiguous. If there is more than

plex, and accordingly the graphic elements attract meanings. A one, no clear direction is indicated. One can take this direction,

sequence of arcs is a bridge, a plane with lines drawn through it but also another one; one can take no path at all, but rather

is a plowed field, a zigzag line is a flash of lightning, with a sow- contemplate the network of paths as a network of possibilities. A

ing of points one has the stars. Parallel lines that, after some time, picture is like that. Different points of view can be taken, but none

deviate from each other, show first agreement and then differ- of them will give the viewer an exclusive path since the picture

5 ence, and thereby expression, dynamics, the psyche of the line. as a whole is in view. The work of art could not be experienced

According to Klee, the meaning of lines and figures formed fully otherwise.

by lines is not due to something that functions as a model for Explaining his conception of pictures as fixed movements,

drawing; lines and figures as such have a meaning, parallel to Klee takes this into account. In this sense he speaks of "move-

the meaning of things in the world, but also deviating from it. As ment and countermovement," which, as he says, is identical with

Klee says, art in its relation to the Creation is a "simile"; it is an "objective contrasts" or with "divided colored contrasts." If a

6 "example," just as the terrestrial is a cosmic example. Art is an picture is such a balance of pictorial elements or forces, there

example because it is part of Creation, just as the earth is part is more at stake than just movement. Klee calls this "the simultane-

of the cosmos. But as a simile of Creation, art is more than an ous integration of forms, movement, and countermovement," and,

integral part of the created world. Rather it is creation itself. If art stating the general task of pictorial art, he adds: "Every energy

essentially makes visible, then it is the creation of visibility. demands a complement, in order to achieve a state resting in

13 Because Klee understands art as creation, he also stresses the itself that is mounted on the play of powers." According to Klee

temporal character of art. He questions the distinction between

temporal and spatial arts that Lessing made in his observations 7 Klee, "Schopferische Konfession," 119: "Bewegung liegt allem Werden zugrunde." on the Laocoon sculpture Laocoon and, in contradiction ( , 1766), 8 Ibid., 120: "Auch ein Kunstwerk ist in erster Linie."

9 Ibid.

10 Ibid.

3 Ibid. 1 1 Ibid.: "Dem gleich einem weidenden Tier abtastenden Auge des Beschauers

4 Paul Klee, "Beitrag fur den Sammelband: 'Schopferische Konfession/" in sind im Kunstwerk Wege eingerichtet."

Schriften: Rezensionen und Aufsatze, ed. Christian Geelhaar (Cologne: 1 2 For the meaning of arrows in Klee's work, see Christian Geelhaar, Paul Klee DuMont, 1976), 118. und das Bauhaus (Cologne: M. DuMont Schauberg, 1972), 50-53.

5 Ibid., 118-19. 13 Klee, "Schopferische Konfession," 121: "Jede Energie erheischt ein

6 Ibid., 122. See also Paul Klee, Tagebucher 1898-1918 Textkritische Complement, urn einen in sich selber ruhenden, uber dem Spiel der Krafte (

Neuedition ), ed. Wolfgang Kersten (Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz, 1988), #1008. gelagerten Zustand zu verwirklichen." this state is the true equivalent of Creation: "Out of abstract for- its essence. Klee's art reduces everything to its very possibility mal elements, by means of their unification as concrete beings or and, thereby, conceives it and makes visible its essential involve- as abstract things like numbers or letters, finally a formal cosmos ment with everything else. Everything is seen as belonging to "the is created that is so similar to the Great Creation that it takes Whole," being not so much a distinctive part but rather a possibil- only a breath to realize the expression of the religious as well as ity of it, something that emerges from "the Whole," and that can religion. be understood in the possibility of its emergence insofar as it is

This result of Klee's reflections is quite surprising. Though bound to everything else that is of the same original kind, of the

Klee's intention first was to explain his understanding of art as same original possibility. Or, in his own words: "I am seeking a a simile of Creation by characterizing the picture as movement, more remote point [of view], a point more original in the sense

his explication of movement in the picture leads him finally to of creation, where I divine a kind of formula for animals, plants, the conception of the picture as rest, according to which rest is the human being, earth, fire, water, air, and all circling powers at

16 not just an intermediate state of movement. Rest in Klee's sense the same time." is not contrary to movement but rather encompasses it; rest is the balance between movement and countermovement and thus beyond both of them. z

Klee's transition from movement to rest, however, is consistent. Klee's more remote point (of view) is not somewhere on earth,

If movement is fixed in a work, the work itself must be the ground not even in the universe. Earth and air—the density and firmness of for this fixation so that, as a picture, it cannot be movement at the earth as well as the openness of the sky—can neither be a foun- all. And if there is more than one fixed movement in a work, the dation nor a lofty perspective for the more original view because picture as such is not fixed movement, but rather a network of they are encompassed by this view; they are original possibilities fixed movements. It is the foundation upon which such a network of creation. The artist himself cannot provide the artistic point (of is possible. The enabling of this network makes pictures similes of view) as conceived by Klee either. The artist is a human being;

Creation, insofar as the created world is the cosmos in the strict his view is human. By dissolving himself however, he has aban- sense of the Greek word; creation is beautiful order. Only as doned the human perspective. He has become an artist, thinking resting within itself can a picture be a microcosm parallel to the in points, lines, and planes, thinking in colors. These are not the macrocosm of "the Great Creation." artist's "means" that he uses in order to produce pictures. Rather

But the structure of fixed movements is no sufficient reason for points, lines, planes, and colors are the elements of the artist, as a work of art to be a simile of Creation. As structured, a picture water is the element for a fish. "Color possesses me," Klee writes may appear as a result, as something created that may remind in his diary, one day on his trip to Tunisia in 1914, "I don't have to

one of creation, but is not creation itself. In order to be similar pursue it. It will possess me always, I know it. That is the meaning

17 to creation, a picture must have a character comparable to the of this happy hour: Color and I are one. I am a painter." This process of creation without, as a picture, being a process at all. holds true for the element of visual possibility in every respect.

Klee's answer to this possibility is in his diary. A 1916 entry Points, lines, planes, and color can be experienced all over gives an extensive and detailed account of Klee's self-conception the world. The world insofar as it is visible is color, and in color, as an artist. According to this entry, Klee does not understand his points, lines, and planes can emerge. In the visible world, every- art as specifically "human." It is not motivated by a "passionate thing is too perfect even in its imperfection, too distinct, and too kind of humanity," and it is no expression of an "earthly hearti- strictly separated from everything else. The "kind of formula" the ness." It is not to articulate human affections, but rather to go artist seeks can only be found if the element of visual possibility

beyond that: "I dissolve myself in the Whole, and then I am fra- as such can be experienced. This however is only the case in art.

15 ternally on par with the next and all earthly neighbors." Here, For an artist, points, lines, planes, and color are not just given

Klee describes his attempt to abandon a specifically human per- so that attention may be paid to them or not. With art, they are spective. His art does not depict elements as determined by this there; they belong to the potential of art, to a whole of elemen- perspective; it does not relate to human affections and aims, nor is tary possibilities that are realized as possibilities in painting and his art within the realm of human understanding. Klee's art is sup- drawing. posed to discover the ground out of which specific forms of life, The potential of art is bound to visibility. It is not given in imag- including human life, emerge; everything must not be regarded in ination or conception, as if the artist would first have the potential its distinctiveness—as if it were independently there, a fully devel- in mind and then realize it on paper or canvas with pencils or oped individual that can be characterized or even defined in brushes. Points, lines, and planes in art are not what they are in

geometry; color is no matter of fact describable in physics. In

14 Ibid.: "Aus abstrakten Formelementen wird uber ihre Vereinigung zu konkre-

ten Wesen oder zu abstrakten Dingen wie Zahlen und Buchstaben hinaus 16 Ibid., #1008: "Ich suche...einen entlegeneren, schopfungsursprunglicheren

zum SchluB ein formaler Kosmos geschaffen, der mit der groBen Schopfung Punkt, wo ich eine Art Formel ahne fur Tier, Pflanze, Mensch, Erde, Feuer,

solche Ahnlichkeit aufweist, daB ein Hauch genugt, den Ausdruck des Reli- Wasser, Luft und alle kreisenden Krafte."

giosen, die Religion zur Tat werden zu lassen." 17 Ibid., #926: "Die Farbe hat mich. Ich brauche nicht nach ihr zu haschen.

15 Klee, Tagebucher, # 1 007: "Ich lose mich ins Ganze auf und stehe dann auf Sie hat mich fur immer, ich weiss das. Das ist der glucklichen Stunde Sinn: einer bruderlichen Stufe zum nachsten, zu alien irdischen Nachbarn." Ich bin Maler." drawing and painting, points and lines are always to be drawn his diary, Klee discovered texture for the first time at the age of

or painted; they are what they are only with respect to graphite, nine. Recollecting his early years, he remembers the tables in his 102 ink, watercolor, or oil paint. The potential of art is the potential uncle's restaurant with their ground and polished marble table- of pictures—on paper, on canvas, or on other kinds of cloth. The tops whose surfaces revealed cross-sections of entangled fossils.

artist's thinking is essentially bound to experimenting with differ- Klee adds that one could find in them grotesque human figures

21 ent materials. and trace them with a pencil. As an artist Klee has done some-

The potential of art is there in every drawing or painting. But thing similar with the pregnant surfaces of his pictures. Klee's pic-

not every artist lets drawings and paintings be manifestations of tures are intensely textural because of their potentiality.

the elementary possibilities of art. Klee does. Dissolving himself But the potential of Klee's pictures is not only textural. What

in "the Whole," he submerges himself in the material potential of can be identified in Klee's pictures has the character of potential-

drawing and painting, in order to let this potential show itself in ity also in itself. In Klee's mature art there is never a complete

his pictures. scheme of something that, more or less detailed, could just be

18 This begins with the material quality of Klee's works. Many understood as the scheme of this something—whether it is an

of them are not just "on paper" or "on canvas," but are built up angel, a human figure or face, an animal, a plant, or a thing.

in complex layers. For example, the catalogue description of Ad What is rather to be seen is an open configuration of points, lines,

Marginem (1930, reworked 1935-36) reads: "Watercolor on and planes. Insofar as it is a configuration, it can be called the

varnish priming on cardboard nailed on a stretcher, white priming text of the picture; it is its more or less distinctive and more or less

19 22 with traces of color verso; stretcher covered with gauze." Klee consistent order. But because of their openness, the orders of

did not often work in "classical" techniques. He combined water- Klee's pictures mostly are as much writings as they are texts. In

color and colored paste, tempera and chalk, oil and watercolor; the rhythm of writing, the order of lines is often seen. They swing

he used different primers such as egg or gypsum. He applied or they are neatly set one by one.

color to these primers and occasionally scratched them, so that Writings as referred to here are not just fixations of texts that

some paintings appear cuneiform-like. He also cut his works into could also be fixed otherwise, so that writing, at least to some

pieces and conglutinated them into new configurations. degree, would be contingent. It is rather the possibility of fixa-

The different materials Klee would use interact in a way that tion as such that is dominant, and writing in this context is not

is not predictable; they cannot be subordinated to any represen- restricted to language. There is language, written language, in

tative intention, but create their own effects. Klee particularly Klee's pictures, as in his drawing To Make Visible (plate 59). But

liked to use colored paste, which differs in tone and quality when written words in a work become parts of it; they can be read,

applied to various groundings, generating contingent effects. Yet but primarily are seen as textual elements among others. The

Klee's concern is not contingency. Rather he wants his pictures textual elements of the works in general are there only as they

to be substantial; they are to appear thing-like. Many of Klee's are written, but writing is not submissive to them. Writing is there

pictures have almost tactile surfaces; they are wooden, earthy in as writing—as lines, repeated and variegated in other lines, as

different tones; like sand, like velvet or have the glaze of mosaics; lines outlining a figure and at the same time disintegrating it. In

they are coarse like rocks or even cloudy and hazy. Nevertheless some of Klee's late works, thick dark lines, very different from the

these surfaces are not for touching, but for seeing. They are over delicate, almost fading lines in earlier pictures, are interlooped so

there, over there, at some distance; otherwise they could not be that figures share contours and are mixed up with each other as 23 contemplated at all. But they are not illusionary stages, on which in a rebus. Klee's drawings are especially pertinent to the study

something is to be seen, not neutral backgrounds for the appear- of his writing; they could even be called an encyclopedia of writ-

ance of something. The paintings mostly do not have foreground ing. There is minimal scribbling that seems to be blown together

and background. So they are not mere optical phenomena; by wind like the Medley of Little People ( allerlei kleines Volk )

rather they encounter the beholder. They are seen in their sub- (1932; plate 29); there are compact forms constituted by only a

stantiality, without being only things. They are pregnant things, few contouring lines like the ambivalent, perhaps metamorphos-

potentials of appearance and appearing as such potentials. ing one that is called More Bird (m ehr Vogel there are ) (1939);

They are intensely present in what can called their texture. graceful ornaments that gather to form Little Tree Baumchen be ( )

This is their dense, somehow structured, but not clearly-ordered (1935; plate 9); there are dense ravels of chalk or pencil lines, 20 quality. Texture can appear transparent, as in From Gliding to evoking scenes of brutal violence and murder (plates 46-54);

Rising (von Gleiten zu Steigenj (1923; plate 18) or enigmatically there are neat repetitions constructing City of Cathedrals ( Stadt

closed like in A Gate (e/n Tor plate 45). According to der Kathedralenj plate and open configurations of ) (1939; (1927; 66),

proto-signs, which cover and structure the whole sheet of paper—

as in Uneven Flight ( unebene Fluchtj (1939; plate 14). 18 For a detailed description of Klee's technique, see Will Grohmann, Paul It is the textural potentiality and the writing potential of Klee's Klee (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1954), 151 -52. 19 Matthias Barman, ed., Paul Klee: Tod und Feuer; die Erfullung im Spatwerk,

exh. cat. (Riehen/Basel: Fondation Beyeler; Wabern/Bern: Benteli, 2003), 179. 21 Klee, Tagebucher, #27.

20 For the notion of texture, see Figal, Erscheinungsdinge: Asthetik a/s 22 For the notion of text, see Figal, Erscheinungsdinge, 161 -64. Phanomenologie (Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 222-23. 23 As an especially fine example, note Forest Witches Wald-Hexen 2010), ( ) (1938). pictures that make them similes of generation. As similes they are tigation of appearance," and this investigation was realized by not generation itself, nor do they depict nor imitate it. The pic- being especially attentive to the "air space" between the artist's 27 tures are like generation, because they have the originality of eye and the motif, or, as Klee says, between "Me and You." 103 something immediately generated. What is there as a picture and What was made visible by this art was "the surface of the object 28 in a picture appears as if it had just come to the surface; it has as filtered by air." As Klee stresses, these artistic natural studies appeared in an emphatic way. It is not the result of standard pro- are not to be underestimated, but they have to be "extended," duction following predetermined rules and techniques. Whereas because the artist of today is "more than a refined camera"; the 29 the products of such techniques can be traced back to the condi- artist of today is "more complicated, richer, and more spacious." tions of their becoming as to their possibility, Klee's pictures are The spatiality of the art of today—and this is of course mainly not the realizations of predetermined possibility but they are pos- Klee's own art— is not only due to the air space between the art- sible as such. Admittedly, Klee's works have this in common with ist and the motif. Rather it goes along with "a more spacious all true works of art, but making something visible that has not conception of the object." Klee explains this conception as 30 ever been seen before augments their essential possibility. Even "totalization." Objects are not only taken as appearances, if no identifiable scheme is discovered in them, Klee's pictures but they are "extended" by our knowledge of their "interior." 24 make visible something. Although Klee admired Kandinsky, his They are "dissected," and their interiors are visualized in cross- own pictures are not "abstract"; they are not reduced to mere sections. What is made visible in this way is, of course, also an color or mere configurations of lines. They bring a visibility that appearance, but it is no prima facie appearance as it is given shows something as how it truly is for the first time. As Klee says with the naively perceived object. It is an appearance, in which in his essay "On Modern Art," for the artist creation is never fin- something shows itself as what it is in its phenomenal complexity. ished; it continues, just as it has ever continued before. The artist It is an original image, and this image is spatial. extends Creation from the past to the future, thereby imparting Klee does not explain this spatiality further. But, contemplat- 25 durability to it. The artist accordingly varies and develops fur- ing his works, one can understand it easily. In his pictures, the ther forms to be found in nature because he is not bound to factu- "objects" Klee speaks of are not depicted (i.e. reproduced in ally given forms, he is able to seek their inherent essential pos- their prima facie appearance), but rather transformed into the sibility. In distancing himself from depicting, his orientation shifts writing of lines and in patches or surfaces of color. Everything 26 "from modeled image to primordial image." identifiable appears in the elements of the picture, and thus its

Original images are individuals, and as individuals they can- pictorial possibility is revealed. This revelation is an extension, a not be subsumed under concepts, but must be named. Klee's display, a spreading out of lines and colors that allows pictorial titles are names in this sense. They do not indicate what has been appearance. depicted nor do they explain what is seen to ease the viewer's As an extension, pictorial appearance needs space. It needs understanding. Klee's titles, some of them one-line poems, even an open realm in which the lines and colors can take place, close shorter than haiku, name the picture itself and thereby also what to each other or at a distance, distinct or almost fusing. As Klee has been made visible by it. This is especially significant with titles writes, "to paint well is simply the following: to put the right color

31 that name states, like Ad Marginem or From Gliding to Rising. at the right place." A place is "right" if the line or color can

Every picture is a visible possibility, and as such it is an original play its particular role in the whole of the picture; it must be there picture. Though art, as Klee describes it, can impart durability to where it complements the other colors and is complemented by

Creation only in an unceasing exploration of the possible, every them, where it contributes best to the whole appearance which picture as such must be an "original image," bringing about the is the picture itself. So it is the picture that demands the right original possibility of what is made visible. Every picture is origi- place for every color and for every line. The picture also confirms nal without being in process and thus being in time. whether or not a place has been the right one. The picture is the

Klee pursued his reflections on art in this direction, and he space for everything that belongs to it. Pictures are spatial not in did so in tacit opposition to his "Creative Credo." Whereas Klee evoking the illusion of space, but in their own material extension in this essay conceived space as temporal, some years later he that gives places and free space to colors and lines and so to instead conceives artistic space as non-reductive. In his 1923 appearance. essay "Ways of Studying Nature," he characterizes his art by Though this holds true for every picture including those that distancing himself from the kind of artistic natural studies that can present illusionary spaces, Klee's pictures are eminently spatial. easily be identified as relating to impressionism. The concern of Their spatiality is present not least because illusionary space is these natural studies was the "scrupulously differentiated inves- absent. The limited textural surface of Klee's works is the par-

24 See Klee, "Die Ausstellung des Modernen Bundes im Kunsthaus Zurich,"

Die Atpen 6 (Aug. 1912), reprinted in Schriften, 105-111, esp. 108. 27 Klee, "Wege des Naturstudiums," in Schriften, 124.

25 Paul Klee, Ober die moderne Kunst (Bern: Benteli, 1945), 43: "Er viz. 28 Ibid.

der Kunstler erlaubt sich dann auch den Gedanken, daB die Schopfung 29 Ibid.: "Der heutige Kunstler ist mehr als verfeinerte Kamera, er ist heute kaum schon abgeschlossen sein konne, und dehnt damit jenes komplizierter, reicher und raumlicher."

weltschopferische Tun von ruckwarts nach vorwarts. Der Genesis Dauer 30 Ibid., 125.

verleihend." 31 "Gut malen ist einfach folgendes: richtige Farbe an richtigen Ort setzen,"

26 Ibid., 47: "Vom Vorbildlichen zum Urbildlichen!" cited in Geelhaar, Paul Klee, 48n31. m

ticular space of the pictures—a space for colors having found

their place and for lines having been inscribed. Many of Klee's 104 paintings even show their spatial character. A painting like Green

Terrain grunes Gelandej plate 1 presents what the title ( (1938; )

says by itself being a "green terrain." Ad Margine shows the

limits of the pictorial space that it is by placing all its plant- and

animal-like figurines at its edges and by leaving the main space

in the middle free for a dominant dark red ball—a sun, perhaps, 32 that rules the cosmos of the painting.

Most prominently, however, pictorial spaces are depicted in

images that themselves show pictorial spaces. In these works,

pictorial space is doubled and in this doubling is reflected visu-

ally. Aqain and aqain Klee has drawn and painted qardens

and carpets. 33 These paintings have a paradigmatic character,

because other paintings that do not show gardens and carpets

take up and vary their structure. Gardens and carpets are struc-

turally akin; in Islamic art, many carpets represent gardens—not in

depicting them, but being a repetition of them structurally.

Gardens are nature contained within nature, representing

nature only by limiting it. Gardens are limited spaces in which

only some kinds of plants or rocks are put together in a configura-

tion. In such limited spaces, nature is ordered in a certain way, so

that the order of nature itself can become intelligible. The order

of a garden is not the order of nature as such; it is not unnatural,

and can rather be understood as a particular possibility of natu-

ral order. Gardens are like cross-section areas of nature, just as

Klee's pictures are cross-section areas of Creation—spatial micro-

cosmic possibilities, spaces in space that have originated from

the cosmic potential. If, seeing a picture, one immediately knows

that it is a Klee, one has probably understood this, even if one

is not able to put it into words. But as to pictorial art, words are

always late. What can be understood of a picture is in the picture

itself.

Composition with Symbols ( Composition mit Symbolen), plate 11 is 32 ( ) 1917; quite similar.

33 For examples, see Michael Baumgartner and Marianne Keller, eds., In Paul

Klees Zaubergarten, exh. cat. (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2008) and Michael

Baumgartner et al., Auf der Suche nach dem Orient/Paul Klee. Teppich der

Erinnerung, exh. cat. (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2009). Claude Cernuschi Paul Klee and Language6

INTRODUCTION

A celebrated member of Der Blaue Reiter—an avant-garde group centered in Munich before World War

I— Paul Klee is often associated with its founding, most active members: Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc,

pioneers of a modernist brand of abstraction and practitioners of a mystical, religious form of expressionism.

This association is not altogether surprising. By emphasizing physical process and gestural execution, and

showcasing a fascination with physiognomy, caricature, and non-Western art (as well as the art of children

1 and the insane ), Klee's work frequently betrays the telltale signs of this all-too-subjective, all-too-recalcitrant

movement. Expressionism's cardinal precepts, moreover, are repeatedly given voice in his writings: a cel-

2 3 ebration of instinct, deprecation of the intellect raising of art to near-divine status and tendency to a , a , a 4 justify formal distortions on the basis of the "higher" truths those very same distortions reveal .

5 Even so, Klee is an atypical expressionist . Witty and whimsical, his art betrays qualities incompatible

with a movement particular to whose ethos is an uncompromising belief in the extreme urgency and invio-

late earnestness of self-expression. Not that Klee was less committed to his vocation than other members

of the Blaue Reiter; only that key aspects of his production—e.g., his preference for small scale—bespeaks a

more intimate approach to creativity, one unsusceptible to accommodating the grand cataclysmic imagery

favored by Marc and Kandinsky before the Great War. Klee was unconventional, to be sure, yet his "uncon-

." ventionality," as Clement Greenberg remarked, was still that of "an eccentric but respectable bourgeois

Attracted to satirical humor and biting caricature, he was suspicious of, if not hostile toward, some of the

high-minded propensities of his contemporaries. Though not above referencing the mystical, Klee dubbed

himself a "neutral creature" devoid of "passionate humanity." He celebrated the intuitive subjectivity and

1 Paul Klee, The Diaries of Paul Klee, 1898- 1918, ed. Felix Klee (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1 964), #905: "Children

also have artistic ability, and there is wisdom in their having it! The more helpless they are, the more instructive are the examples

they furnish us; and they must be preserved free of corruption from an early age. Parallel phenomena are provided by the works

of the mentally diseased; neither childish behavior nor madness are insulting words here, as they commonly are."

2 Ibid., #290: "The effect of these works [sculptures at the Lateran Klee witnessed during a trip to Italy], which are after all im-

perfect, cannot be justified on intellectual grounds, and yet I am more receptive to them than to the most highly praised masterpieces."

3 Ibid., #155: "I am God. So much of the divine is heaped in me that I cannot die."

4 Ibid., #136: "Some will not recognize the truthfulness of my mirror. Let them remember that I am not here to reflect the surface (this

can be done with the photographic plate), but must penetrate inside. My mirror probes down to the heart. I write words on the

forehead and around the corners of the mouth. My human faces are truer than real ones." See also ibid., #677, #681, #1081, and Will Grohmann, Paul Klee (New York: Henry N. Abrams, 1955), 365, 367, 372.

5 See Jean Laude, "Paul Klee: letters, 'ecriture,' signes," in Ecritures: Systemes ideographiques et pratiques expressives, ed. Anne-

Marie Christin and Pierre Amiet (Paris: Le Sycomore, 1982), 355. See also Charles Werner Haxthausen, Paul Klee: The Forma-

tive Years (New York: Garland, 1981), 365, 430, 431, 475.

6 Clement Greenberg, "Art Chronicle: On Paul Klee (1870-1940)," in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism,

Vo I. I: Perceptions and Judgments, 1939- 1944, ed. John O'Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 67. 7 Klee, Diaries, #1008. 105 strategies to radical experimentation. Whether a painting should

record a visual scene, spell out a linguistic message, or exercise 106 both options simultaneously was no longer clear. Modernists were equally bent on highlighting the convention-

ality of language to valorize abstract art. If non-mimetic signs

could systematically combine to communicate abstruse ideas

or subtle states of mind, so, the reasoning went, could abstract

painting and sculpture. On this score, the arbitrariness of lan-

guage supplied as persuasive a justification for the new art as

the frequently touted analogy between painting and music.

Paradoxically, language also justified abstraction from the

opposite perspective. If the new poetry fragmented syntax and

undermined the very coherence of words, then illegibility could

be flaunted as a virtue rather than a vice. Rather than stress the

capacity of arbitrary signs to convey meaning, poets unhinged

the graphic marks or sounds of language from their function as

communication. On this account, the purpose of art was not to

transfer a specific, decodable message, but celebrate semantic

ambiguity (the Russian linguist Roman Jakobson aptly dubbed

this tendency "making strange").

Accordingly, a cursory look at the art of the past century

reveals, not simply the persistence, but also the diversity, with

which artists engaged the linguistic. In Henry van Velde's ini-

tials, one sees symbolism's fascination with script; in Picasso and

Braque's canvases, cubism's fascination with fractured words and

stenciling techniques; in Marinetti's Parole in liberta, futurism's

fascination with phonics; in Duchamp's L.H.O.O.Q., Dada's fas- Fig. 1 : Egon Schiele ( 1890- 1919), Self-Portrait as St. Sebastian (poster

for Galerie Arnot), 1914- 15. Pen, ink, and gouache on paper, 67 x cination with irony and wordplay; in Stuart Davis's Odol, modern- 50 cm, Historisches Museum der Stadt Wien, Vienna. ism's fascination with brand name recognition; in Magritte's lin-

guistic mismatches, surrealism's fascination with the arbitrariness

formal liberties of expressionism, readily acknowledging creativ- of the sign; in Andy Warhol's headlines, Pop's fascination with

8 ity's mysterious dimension, but he steered his art in different the power of the press; in Roy Lichtenstein's comics, a fascination

directions, allowing a certain detachment or calculation to tem- with narrative and onomatopoeia; in Joseph Kosuth's dictionary

per expressionism's tendency toward emotional overstatement definitions, conceptual art's fascination with ideas; in Basquiat's

or affective excess. "Form," he professed, "and not too much scribbles, postmodernism's fascination with graffiti; in the Starn

feeling." 9 Twins' Anne Frank, a fascination with language's denunciatory

Klee also stands as an atypical expressionist for another rea- power; in Barbara Kruger's I Shop Therefore I Am, a fascination

son: his art's engagement with language. If linguistic elements with the dominance of consumerism in contemporary culture.

populate the expressionist landscape—e.g., in the prints of Ernst Such diverse references to language in the art of the last

Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Oskar Kokoschka or Egon Schiele century might well confirm Roland Barthes's suspicion that, for

(fig. 1 )—these primarily serve advertising or labeling purposes, all that is said—even today—about the increasing and pervasive

10 revealing little of the fragmentation of typography and syntax power of images, we still exist in a culture of writing. In par-

discernible in, say, cubism, futurism, constructivism, Dadaism, allel, though language has preoccupied linguists and philoso-

and even surrealism. Hoping to respond meaningfully to the phers from Plato onward, its study took on added urgency in the

condition of modernity, members of these movements renounced

subjective self-expression to undermine semiotic consistency (a 10 This is not to dismiss language's appearance in visual art prior to the twen-

notion, ironically enough, sometimes erroneously claimed to be tieth century. One thinks, for example, of the inclusion of "Approche, ap-

proche" in Les tres riches heures du Due de Berry, by the Limbourg brothers, indissolubly fundamental to, if not determinative of, modernism or of "Ave Maria" in Jan van Eyck's Ghent altarpiece, written upside down itself). Appropriating formal strategies original to popular cul- so that only God might read it, attest to the power of words, again to cite ture, where linguistic versus representational boundaries—espe- Barthes, to enhance the communicative aspect of visual images, to anchor meanings that may otherwise be more difficult to construe. Following the cially in advertising—were rarely respected, they subjected these Renaissance, however, artists generally avoided incorporating lettering in

high art practice, no doubt because the insertion of flat, planar characters

8 See Paul Klee, Notebooks, Volume 2: The Nature of Nature, ed. Jurg Spill- undermined the illusion of three-dimensional space so hardly won though

er, trans. Heinz Norden (London: Lund Humphries, 1970), 255. modeling, anatomical accuracy, and linear perspective. Predictably, linguis-

Letter to Lily Stumpf, Feb. 23, 1903 in Paul Klee, Briefe an die Familie: tic signs reappear in visual art precisely when those very same devices lose

1893-1940, ed. Felix Klee, 2 vols. (Cologne: DuMont, 1979), 1 :312. credibility among modernist artists. twentieth century: from Ferdinand de Saussure and C. S. Peirce, however, as Richard Hoppe-Sailer has noted, that "unambiguous

Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger, Benjamin Whorf interpretations" may be culled from Klee's titles, especially when 22 and Edward Sapir, J. L. Austin and John Searle, Gottlob Frege "text and image barely seem to occupy any common ground." 107 and Noam Chomsky, to the recent work of Eve Sweetser, Mark Titles were often ascribed and changed after the fact if it suited

Johnson, George Lakoff, Terence Deacon, Steven Pinker, and the artist's purpose. And Klee had a singular penchant for com-

countless others, language—identified as a unique and defining bining disparate elements. Blessed with a multiplicity of talents,

characteristic of the human species—has proven increasingly cen- he played violin at a near-professional level, and seriously con-

tral to defining what is human from what is not. Predictably, the templated a career in poetry, a path whose exercise, he seriously

history of art reflects this fascination: no less than language, art is believed, would not hinder his parallel ambition to become a 23 a uniquely human form of endeavor. visual artist. Even as he gradually decided in favor of painting,

Locating Klee's place in this frenzy of aesthetic and philo- he allowed interdisciplinary interests to steer his painterly deci-

sophical activity is no easier than defining it in the expression- sions in multifarious ways. He created numerous illustrations of

ist movement. Regarding his everyday working methods and the literary texts, e.g., Voltaire's Candide (1911 - 12) (plates 56-57)

theoretical underpinnings of his teaching, Klee resisted system- and Curt Corrinth's Postdamer Platz, and, even more importantly

11 ization. That said, language played a critical role in his work. To for our purposes, inserted literal writing in the very visual fabric of

12 cite Marcel Franciscono: Klee's "basic impulse was graphic," his images, exploring the poetic while simultaneously indulging

or Charles Haxthausen: Klee's drawings frequently evoke "quali- in the same kind of radical experimentation as other modernists.

13 ties of handwriting" (so much so that the artist's practice was But linguistic signs take many forms, and the diversity with

to paint, not standing at an easel, but sitting at a large drawing which they appear in Klee's work belies strict categorization, a

14 table). One may add, with James Smith Pierce, that Klee "liter- task nonetheless greatly facilitated by the impressive scholarly

15 ally wrote [some of] his pictures," and, with Greenberg, that, work of Marianne Vogel and Kathryn Porter Aichele, to whom

on account of its small scale, his work falls within the dimensional any serious investigator of Klee's relationship to language owes a

16 24 orbit of the book. Not surprisingly, Klee drew considerable inspi- substantial debt. Among the key issues both address is whether

ration from satiric periodicals such as Jugend or Simplicissimus the relationship between word and image in Klee is one of dis- 25 during his formative years: "I... wanted to produce illustrations for junction or reconciliation, an especially difficult question to

17 humor magazines," the artist later admitted. "Only what was answer because, as Aichele admits, Klee's approach to creativity

18 26 forbidden pleased me. Drawing and writing." "precludes the encoding of fixed meaning." As a result, Klee's

Tagging the drawing/writing combination as "forbidden" inti- work, like that of many artists, has generated multiple, often con- 27 mates how this merger, tolerated in popular illustration, remained tradictory, readings. All the same, this diversity should hardly

unacceptable in high art. Benton being provocative, on blurring prohibit art historians from identifying distinct tendencies within

19 boundaries, Klee imbued his work with a calligraphic qual- his production, as variegated as that production may be, and so

ity, and, throughout his career, was inordinately sensitive to the long as the requisite disclaimer (i.e., that these tendencies cannot

way language inflects the interpretation of art. "All visual art," be considered exhaustive) accompanies those identifications. At 20 he declared, "starts with a title," explaining a life-long habit of the very least, such exercises allow the richness and complexity

inscribing titles underneath his works with clarity and precision, of Klee's engagement with the linguistic to emerge in sharper

making the inscription an integral component of both the visual relief, the more so because another of Klee's key ambitions— res-

21 effect as well as the meaning of his work. It does not follow, urrecting the beginnings of art—intersects his engagement with

language in significant ways. To his mind, drawing and writing

11 See Laude, "Paul Klee," 354. had a common origin, expressed in the most fundamental visual 12 Marcel Franciscono, Paul Klee: His Work and Thought (Chicago: University element: the line. "At the dawn of civilization," he wrote, "when of Chicago Press, 1991), 1. writing and drawing were the same thing, [the line] was the 13 Haxthausen, Paul Klee, 272.

14 Matthias Barmann, '"As if it concerned myself,' Emigration, Illness, and the 28 basic element." The idea is hardly farfetched; in ancient Greek, Creative Process in Paul Klee's Last Years," in Paul Klee: Tod und Feuer;

die Erfullung im Spatwerk, ed. Matthias Barman, exh. cat. (Riehen/Basel: Fondation Beyeler; Wabern/Bern: Benteli, 2003), 13. 128. 15 James Smith Pierce, Paul Klee and Primitive Art (New York: Garland, 1976), 22 Richard Hoppe-Sailer, "Genesis and Garden: The Case of 'Inferner Park,"'

88 . in In Paul Klee's Enchanted Garden, ed. Michael Baumgartner and Mari-

16 Greenberg, "Paul Klee," 68. anne Keller, exh. cat. (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2008), 76. 17 Klee, Diaries, #105. 23 Klee, Diaries, #121.

18 Ibid., #63. 24 See Vogel, Zwischen Wort und Bild, Kathryn Porter Aichele, Paul Klee's

19 Ann Temkin, "Paul Klee and the Avant-Garde 1912-1940," in Paul Klee, Pictorial Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) and

ed. Carolyn Lanchner (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1987), 17. Aichele's Paul Klee, Poet/Painter (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2006).

20 Letter to Lily Stumpf, Nov. 1, 1903 in Klee, Briefe, 1:359. 25 Aichele, Paul Klee's Pictorial Writing, 9.

21 In this context, one might also cite the intriguing argument presented by 26 Ibid., 10 and Vogel, Zwischen Wort und Bild, 120-24. Peter Klaus Schuster, of a relationship between Klee's use of language and 27 See, for example, Jenny Anger, "How Many Klees Today?," Canadian Art emblem books. See "The World as Fragment: Building Blocks of the Klee Review 18 (1992): 102-111, or Stephen H. Watson, Crescent Moon over

Universe," in The Klee Universe, ed. Dieter Scholz and Christina Thomson, the Rational: Philosophical Interpretations of Paul Klee (Stanford: Stanford

exh. cat. (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2008), 14-23. See also Marianne Vo- University Press, 2009).

gel, Zwischen Wort und Bild: Das schriftliche Werk Paul Klees und die Rolle 28 Paul Klee, Notebooks, Volume I: The Thinking Eye, ed. Jurg Spiller, trans.

der Sprache in seinem Denken und in seiner Kunst (Munich: Scaneg, 1 992), Ralph Manheim (New York: George Wittenborn, 1961), 103. a

human individuals, with no complicated puns or semantic allu-

sions to decipher. To Make Visible (sichtbar machen) ( 1926; plate 108 59) is more subtle, althouqh a human fiqure still shares the visual field with language: in this case, the Ids "sichtbat machen»

("to make visible"). Disparate though visual and verbal elements

may be, they are now connected insofar as a nearly identical

figure-eight outlines both the eyes of the figure and the letter s of

"sichtbar." "Making visible" thus refers both to the very title of this

work, and to the function of art in general— not, as in The Bavarian

Don Giovanni, to the names of individuals. Allowing shapes to

perform double-duty—a proclivity often found in Klee's engage-

ment with the linguistic— is all the more appropriate here because,

whenever anything is made visible, it is accessible through the 29 sense of sight, or, to put it differently, through the eye. These

differences notwithstanding, The Bavarian Don Giovanni and To

Make Visible still share a common element. Since letters, in Klee's

own words, eliminate foreshortening and, "force the third dimen- 30 sion into the flat plane," word and image coexist in a "bookish"

space, perhaps a catalogue for The Bavarian Don Giovanni 31

or a primer for To Make Visible. The writing is not inserted in a

conventional, illusionistic or perspectival visual frame but in one

already distorted and flattened to accommodate it. In the pro-

Fig. 2: Paul Klee (1879-1940), The Bavarian Don Giovanni ( Der cess, the metaphor of the book— i.e., of a flat but heterogeneous

bayrische Don Giovanni ), 1919/116. Watercolor and ink on paper, field—displaces the governing metaphor for visual art since the 22.5 x 21.3 cm, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY, Estate of Karl Nierendorf, 48.1172.69. Renaissance: i.e., of a window on the world.

In High and Shining Stands the Moon (Ho ch und stralend

Mayan, and Old English, the words for writing and painting are steht der Mond) (1916; fig. 3), Klee included a translation of a one and the same. poem by Wang Seng Yu, and amended some of the words, as

Klee, it seems, was an astute student of the image/language if in a new form of illuminated manuscript: "Hoch" appropriately

relationship. In addition, and more surprisingly, he deployed for- appears to descend the slope of a hill while the o of "Mond"

mal and thematic strategies that anticipate arguments present-day ("Moon," in English) is much brighter than its surrounding letters, 32 linguists, neuroscientists, and cognitive psychologists have made making it stand out like an astral body. This provides a per-

about the birth of communication and the way the brain pro- fect example of what Marianne Vogel calls Klee's tripartite use

33 cesses writing. Since this aspect of his artistic production has yet of shapes as letters, pictorial elements, and objective forms. In

to be given attention in the art historical literature, it will occupy this instance, Klee manufactured visual solutions that correlate

a central place in this essay. And though the artist could not have to the specific meanings of the words employed, if only in select

known, let alone digested, recent advances in linguistics, cogni- examples, because words seldom offer the opportunity to have a

tive psychology, and neuroscience, it will be the contention of this single letter—in this case, the o of "Mond"—or an abstract form—

study that, from this select, interdisciplinary perspective, Klee's circle—resemble the complete outline of the object to which they

subtle and distinctive engagements with the linguistic reveal a refer.

different logic than what emerges from traditional art historical In another poem Klee chose to "embellish," Once Risen from

accounts, a logic that may mandate adopting a more elastic defi- the Gray of Night ( Einst dem Grau der Nacht enttaucht ) (1918;

nition of what constitutes the linguistic. fig. 4), a text now attributable to the artist himself, color sometimes

enhances, sometimes obscures the letters themselves, making the 34 poem difficult to read. (This ambiguity perhaps prompted Klee

KLEE'S USE OF LANGUAGE to write out the poem, in legible handwriting, and in its entirety,

At the outset, it is instructive to review some of the visual/con- immediately above the "illuminated" version.) The piece thus

ceptual models to which Klee alluded when inserting writing into juxtaposes two possible ways of manipulating language: one,

his images. Intriguingly, even a penchant for complexity did not

prevent him, on occasion, from employing language in a purely 29 Aichele, Paul Klee's Pictorial Writing, 15. conventional sense. The Bavarian Don Giovanni ( Der bayrische 30 Klee, Diaries, #425. Don Giovanni a not-so-veiled reference to Leporello's ) (1919), 31 Klee apparently kept such a catalogue himself, to remind him of "the great

sexual question" (ibid., famous catalogue aria in Mozart's opera, simply allows the #83). 32 Aichele, Paul Klee's Pictorial Writing, 72. names of the artist's fictive feminine conquests to float willy-nilly 33 Vogel, Zwischen Wort und Bild, 121.

before the picture plane (fig. 2). Here, words refer to specific 34 See Marc Le Bot, Paul Klee (Paris: Maeght, 1992), 88. . 4

in which letters are clearly

outlined; and another, where

they function as a scaffolding, 35 109 to use Jenny Anger's term,

within which changing colors

inject variety in the composi-

tion. Though color choice is by

no means predictable, Aichele

notes that the grays and blues

in the upper section reflect the

darker imagery of the poem's

introduction, while certain indi-

vidual words, such as "fire,"

are highlighted with orange

and yellow. 36 These amend- ments again demonstrate

the variety with which Klee W4 Ht U Man Auirtf /.iivv t*^^**^ < -ww £<*^< e*A*ltn-'f: >‘tA. WK- W employed language, not just n>-t'K& qiMr.dVrtuX A**Cfi- T(kjln(T aUz vo, from work to work, but even

within the fabric of individual

Fig. 3: Paul Klee, High and Shining Stands the Moon Hoch und stralend steht der Mond), 1916/20. ( works themselves. It is almost Watercolor and pen on paper, 14 x 24 cm, private collection. as if, by presenting different

possibilities, the artist invites us

to ponder how or whether these differences signify. Do colors jefiitya* »u tW, 'k*nl »«. j/a. ftut-. yicrkii W ttk !«i7cjifmgtr / ‘dknftKjj Vlht M*u- KrusjiiMtfltg communicate effectively on their own, or only as auxiliaries to a 7.M, dm j j fj.'d.t tnnv text? Does the application of color enhance or distract from the

interpretation of meaning? Are colors equal, or are some more

communicative than others? Klee may not have come to definitive

answers to these questions himself; instead, he conducted experi-

ments through which they might be asked and visualized.

Even so, just as The Bavarian Don Giovanni and To Make

Visible allude to a catalogue or a primer, respectively, High

and Shining Stands the Moon and Once Risen from the Gray of

Night recall typesetting grids, where letters fit in compartments

arranged along bands and rows, alternating size and font, but

retaining a flat, anti-illusionistic character. (On occasion, Klee

borrowed the age-old convention of enlarging or highlighting the

initial letter of a text, poem, or inscription.) Speaking of grids,

even architecture provided a geometric lattice into which he

inserted linguistic elements, as in City of Cathedrals ( Stadt der

Kathedralenj (1927; plate 66). Facades, according to Andrew

Kagan, are "assembled from sign-units—Xs, Os, dashes, and so

forth—[and thus] are closely related to Klee's numerous script 37 pictures." They are also related, as Andre Masson cleverly 38 noticed, to pre-Colombian textiles, perhaps Inca quipu knotting

believed to comprise an accounting system or rudimentary alpha-

bet (fig. 5). Klee might have been aware of this connection, given

that Anni Albers, the wife of Josef and a great admirer of Klee,

35 Jenny Anger, Paul Klee and the Decorative in Modern Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 86. 36 Aichele, Paul Klee's Pictorial Writing, 77; see also, Jurgen Glaesmer, Paul Klee: The Colored Works (Bern: Kunstmuseum Bern, 1979), 47. Fig. 4: Paul Klee, Once Risen from the Gray of Night [Einst dem Grau 37 Andrew Kagan, "Paul Klee's 'Polyphonic Architecture,"' Arts Magazine 54, der Nacht enttaucht], 1918/17. Watercolor, pen, and pencil on paper; no. 8 (Jan. 1980): 156; see also Vogel, Zwischen Wort und Bild, 127, and cut, recombined, and bordered with ink, 22.6 x 15.8 cm, Zentrum Paul Aichele, Paul Klee's Pictorial Writing, 153-55. Klee, Bern. 38 Andre Masson, Eulogy of Paul Klee (New York: Curt Valentin, 1950), np. )

Fig. 5: Inca Quipu, rope, c. 1300- 1532, Museo Larco, Lima.

Fig. 7: Paul Klee, Drawing Knotted in the Manner of a Net ( Zeichnung

in der Art eines Netzes geknupft), 1920/98. Pen and black ink on wove paper, 31.1 x 19.1 cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, The Berggruen Klee Collection, 1984.315.20.

40 upper right. Intriguingly, Mark Roskill described Klee's archi-

tectural designs as if they were tapestries: "The effect is of an Fig. 6: Anni Albers ( 1 899- 1 994), Open Letter, 1 958. Weaving, 58.4

x 59.7 cm, Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Bethany, CT. 'architecture' that devolves, as in a tapestry, from the texturing

and the stratification or overlap of intercalated shapes, close up

executed numerous woven patterns, one of which was reveal- behind the picture plane." 41 Aichele says something similar of

ingly entitled Open Letter (fig. 6). According to Virginia Gardner Let It Glow Outside ( lass abseits gluhnj (1915), where "letters

Troy, Open Letter uses thread as text, as "individual pattern units appear to have as much material substance as architectural struc-

that, when taken or 'read' as a whole, implies content and mean- tures," and a "semantic relationship" is established "between the 42 ing through the arrangement of codified visual information, anal- words and the fenestrated building facade."

ogous to the way one reads a paragraph composed of letters, In Ad Marginem (1930), Klee opted for still another 39 words, and sentences." The same may be said of Klee's own approach: instead of evoking architecture or textiles, he painted

Drawing Knotted in the Manner of a Net ( Zeichnung in der Art a natural scene, distributing vegetal and animal forms at the mar-

eines Netzes geknupft (1920; fig. 7), where the letter 8 appears gins of the canvas, thereby explaining the use of the term "mar-

six times on the upper left, and six times, though reversed, on the ginem" in the title (fig. 8). Drawn away from the center, where

it conventionally lies, our attention drifts toward multiple visual

39 Virginia Gardner Troy, Anni Albers and Ancient American Textiles: From

Bauhaus to Black Mountains (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002), 156; see 40 Sabine Rewald, Paul Klee: The Berggruen Klee Collection in the Metropoli- also Jenny Anger, "Paul Klee, Anni and Josef Albers, and Robert Rauschen- tan Museum of Art (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1988), 114-15.

berg: Weaving and the Grid at Black Mountain College," in Klee and 41 Mark Roskill, Klee, Kandinsky, and the Thought of Their Time: A Critical

America, ed. Josef Helfenstein and Elizabeth Hutton Turner (Ostfildern: Perspective (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 83. Hatje Cantz, 2006), 238-53. 42 Aichele, Paul Klee's Pictorial Writing, 4. focal points at the periphery, undermining the conventions of one- Fig. 9: Paul Klee, Landscape near E (in Bavaria) ( Landschaft bei E. [in Bayern]), 1921/182. Oil and pen on paper, cut, recombined and point, perspectival painting. In addition, Klee inserted a number bordered with watercolor and pen, 49.8 x 35.2 cm, Zentrum Paul of isolated letters, r, u, and v in the same visual field, combining /, Klee, Bern. the visually iconic and the arbitrarily symbolic, just as maps combine the physical contours of territory and their corresponding Perchance, we are provided a walking map or a topographic 43 44 verbal labels. If Klee were now looking to maps for conceptual equivalent of a verbal itinerary, or meant to ponder the differ- models, he would be capitalizing, not simply on their ability to ence between language and its referents. A long-debated idea combine word and image, but also on their rotational symme- in the philosophy of language, the latter issue was given literal try: specifically, the way we can instinctively turn maps around incarnation in conceptual art, when Joseph Kosuth, for one, jux- to conform to the direction of our itinerary. Along these lines, it taposed real objects with their dictionary definitions. The contrast is also worth mentioning that placing one cardinal point—e.g., between text and image in Klee's pieces, though present, is less north—at the top of maps is no less arbitrary than language is a jarring, primarily because the objects are not literal and the lin- system of arbitrary signs, since some cultures place south there guistic components incomplete. Yet Klee still invites his audience instead. By conceptualizing painting as a kind of map, rather to speculate about the potential disconnect between verbal and than as an image conforming to the consistent and systematic visual information, if only because, as Aichele rightly posits, a rules of linear perspective, Klee forces us to shift our vantage foreknowledge of the artist's whereabouts at the time of the paint- point, not only from the center to the periphery, but side-wise and ing's execution is necessary to identify the abbreviation. Without even upside down. that information, our ability to associate the painting with any

Although Ad Marginem references no specific geographical location, let alone to interpret the meaning of the initial itself, landmarks, other paintings do precisely that: e.g., Landscape would be severely impeded.

( If near E (in Bavaria) Landschaft bei E. [in Bayern]) (1921 ; fig. 9), Landscape near E (in Bavaria) employs language referen- perhaps an allusion to the village of Ebenhausen near Munich. tia lly, other pieces scatter letters throughout the picture plane,

Here, a letter is firmly embedded in the landscape, no differently ostensibly for their graphic qualities alone. According to Aichele, than footpaths, rock formations, brickwork, or stylized trees. this mode exemplifies a shift in interest among modern artists

43 Ibid., 90. 44 Ibid., 98. 112

/v si V » j,\ /L a.9 *£ A ***»*%*-

Fig. 1 1 : Paul Klee, The Order of High C Der Orden vom hohen C), ( 1921/100. Watercolor and pencil on paper bordered with watercolor,

Fig. 10: Paul Klee, Handbill for Comedians (Werbeblatt der Komiker ), 32 x 23 cm, location unknown. 1938/42. Gouache and newsprint mounted on light cardboard, 48.6

x 32.1 cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, The Berggruen Klee structural units provided models for pictorial constructs that con- Collection, 1984.315.57. formed to a visual logic other than resemblance to the external 49 from "letter design to theories about the origin and nature of world." Aichele hits the nail on the head. Read laterally rather 45 language." In this vein, Handbill for Comedians ( Werbeblatt than in depth, letters rarely permit overlap, foreshortening, or

der Komiker fig. recalls ancient writing systems perspective. As Klee crafted "scripts" that could "read" from ) (1938; 10) be

whose meanings are not readily intelligible because they rely left to right or right to left, top to bottom or bottom to top, his

(like Egyptian hieroglyphs) partly on arbitrary signs, partly on audience registers these compositional configurations as flat, and 46 pictoqraphs. This combination prompted the philosopher Theo- peruses them sequentially, like a writing system, not like the deep,

dor Adorno to call Klee's work "hieroglyphic," the code for which illusionistic space of Western, post-Renaissance art. 47 "has been lost, a loss that plays into its content." In Handbill, The same applies to The Order of High C ( Der Orden vom

Aichele likewise writes, Klee's pictorial language ranges "from hohen C) (1921; fig. 11), although the frame of reference is 48 50 denotative pictographs to nonfigurative abstractions." She now the musical score, another sign system organized later-

also mentions that, by the early twentieth century, a consensus ally rather than illusionistically, with the letter C evoking the open

emerged that hieroglyphs combined phonograms (a verbal unit mouth of a singer, again playing double-duty, just as eyes in To

standing for a sound), logograms (a single symbol represent- Make Visible were denoted by a figure-eight. But instead of refer-

ing an entire word without designating its pronunciation), and encing the sense of sight, Klee draws an analogy between sight = abstract signs. Confined in geometric blocks, hieroglyphs, she and sound, as he did in Child Consecrated to Suffering (W

continues, "were read from right to left and top to bottom." For geweihtes Kind fig. donning a child's forehead with ) (1935; 12),

Klee, "these characteristic features of hieroglyphic signs and their the letter W, pronounced "Weh" in German, the very word for

"suffering." Yet these two uses of letters are radically different: C

45 Ibid., 114. functions both to denote the opening of the mouth and to con-

46 Vogel, Zwischen Wort und Bild, 131. 47 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minne-

sota Press, 1997), 124. 49 Ibid.

48 Aichele, Paul Klee's Pictorial Writing, 133. 50 Ibid., 82-85. not necessarily correspond to

the pitch of the musical note.

The unpredictability with which Klee combined word

and image also jibes with his

strategy of substituting images

for words, such as signing his

work with a clover: "der Klee"

5 in German. ' Sometimes, he

used codified signs out of con-

text, or invented new signs; his

production is so variegated

because he himself loved

"to reconcile. ..opposites! To

express the great manifold in 52 a single word !"

KLEE,

Fig. 12: Paul Klee, Child Consecrated to Suffering [W = geweihte s Kind), 1935/31. Oil and watercolor on READING, AND paper on cardboard, 15.9 x 23.5 cm, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY, Room of Contemporary Art NEUROSCIENCE Fund, RCA 1940:12. Even on the basis of this

cursory, incomplete summary,

one can appreciate not only the formal diversity of, but also the

numerous conceptual sources for Klee's references to language:

books, textiles, maps, typesetting grids, illuminated manuscripts,

architectural facades, musical scores, and non-Western hiero-

glyphs—just to name the most obvious. Facing such pluralism,

it stands to reason that art historians, pondering whether the

word/image relationships Klee established were disjunctive 53

or conciliatory, dismiss the possibility of a single, underlying

rationale governing his engagement with the linguistic. As Ann

Temkin put it: "Klee's signs are as flexible in meaning as they

." 54 are in size or shape This conclusion is widely endorsed, and

remains, in many respects, unassailable. All the same, this essay

will advance the proposition that Klee's word/image combina-

tions veer more—though not exclusively—toward disjunction than

reconciliation, and that recent findings in neuroscience, espe-

cially those pertaining to the biological constraints on reading

and writing, introduce new, more discriminatory conceptual tools

to support this premise.

From this perspective, Klee not only celebrated a modern-

ist sense of space; he also relied—unwittingly—on crucial skills

human beings have acquired through evolution. Since writing is

a relatively new invention (the first alphabets are no more than

five thousand years old), natural selection had barely enough

time to engender a particular proficiency for the tasks of reading

and writing. On the other hand, it cannot be gainsaid that human

Fig. 13: Paul Klee, Villa R, 1919/153. Oil on cardboard, 26.5 x 22 beings possess such a proficiency: namely, to recognize and cm, Kunstmuseum Basel. decipher certain forms, the configurations of which correspond

note its arbitrary meaning in musical notation; W has no com- 51 Klee, Diaries, #295. parable analog in human anatomy, unless it is meant to evoke a 52 Ibid., #389. frown on the child's forehead. Its reference to the sound "Weh" 53 Aichele, Paul Klee's Pictorial Writing, 9. is also more direct, if only because pronouncing the letter C does 54 Temkin, "Paul Klee and the Avant-Garde," 31. 114

Fig. 15: Paul Klee, The Rhine at Duisburg (der Rhein bei Duisburg ),

1937/145. Gypsum, oil, and charcoal on cardboard, 18.4 x 27.3 cm,

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, The Berggruen Klee Collection, 1984.315.56.

In combining, even confusing, landscape and linguistic ele-

ments, Klee revisited a critical aspect of the birth of writing: spe-

cifically, that we re-channeled an ancient, acute sensitivity to the

visual character of our physical environment for the novel pur-

61 pose of inventing graphic forms of communication. These rela-

tionships were not simply noticed by neuroscientists. Historians

of language have also posited that the letter Y looks like a styl-

ized tree—a relationship to which Klee often hints, as in Park near

/.u[cerne] Park bei /.u[zern]) fig. 14)—and have even ( (1938; Fig. 14: Paul Klee, Park near Lu[cerne] ( Park bei Lu[zern ]), 1938/129. identified an ox's head on its side as the source of the Greek Oil and colored paste on paper and jute fabric, 100 x 70 cm, Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern. letter alpha, a, the origin of our letter A (if placed upside down,

even our letter A still reveals this figural pedigree). As is well 55 to the letters of the alphabets they learn. Current neuroscien- known, Klee owned a copy of Karl Weule's study of early scripts,

tists resolve this conundrum by positing that human beings and Vom Kerbstock zunrt Alphabet: Urformen der Schrift (From Incised

their hominid ancestors inherited and honed an ability to detect Stick to Alphabet: The Original Forms of Writing ) that appeared

topographical landscape features—trees, rivers, rock formations, in 1915. James Smith Pierce has already noted that diagrams

etc., and the shapes of protective structures or natural shelters— in the book juxtaposed identifiable, representational shapes and 56 62 for millions of years. It can hardly be coincidental, then, that the Chinese characters from which they were extrapolated. The 57 letters such as T, Y, J, or L are stylized versions of such features. same may be said of many letters in our own alphabet. M for

Quickly recognizable and easy to write, they qualify as ideal example, was derived from a stylized representation of water or 63 candidates for inclusion in a writing system. Klee exploited this waves, a point with which Klee was either familiar or intuited,

relationship with a vengeance; as Will Grohmann comments: as may be seen in The Rhine at Duisburg (der Rhein bei Duisburg )

"one cannot be sure whether the ciphers signify mere landscape (1937; fig. 15), or even in The Scales of Twilight (Die Waage 58 elements or figures." Marcel Franciscono came to an analo- der Dammerung) (1921; plate 5), where mountain peaks and

gous conclusion, writing that, to his mind, Klee reduces "things depressions are designated by means of a hybrid form, some-

themselves—figures, plants, rocks, the very space—to a single thing between an M and a W. 59 kind of being." As far as Villa R (1919; fig. 13) is concerned, But just as Klee gives with one hand, he takes away with

Franciscono claims that the R "is as much an object in the land- the other. He may have recognized that human beings cleverly 60 scape as the villa, the hills, or the heavenly signs." appropriated landscape features to invent written language, yet,

in view of his proclivity for disjunction, he often frustrates our other

proclivity: namely, to discern meaning. Explaining how, though, 55 See Stanislas Dehaene, Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of requires a closer assessment of the reading process, and differen- a Human Invention (New York: Viking Press, 2009), 4.

56 Ibid., 137ff.

57 Ibid., 121 ff. 61 Dehaene, Reading in the Brain, 144ff.

58 See Grohmann, Paul Klee, 335. 62 James Smith Pierce, "Pictographs, Ideograms, and Alphabets in the Work of

59 Franciscono, Paul Klee, 180. Paul Klee," Journal of Typographic Research 1 (July 1967): 220.

60 Ibid., 184. 63 Ibid., 236. tiating that process from other

ways of deciphering meaning.

Reading, after all, mandates

coordinating a specific num-

ber of complex tasks: distin-

guishing large numbers of characters from one another,

upper- from lower-case let-

ters, variations in fonts, and,

when scripts are not printed,

widely different and idiosyn-

cratic forms of handwriting.

In each case, reading is con-

tingent upon identifying what

is invariant— i.e., what remains the same—among the variety

of ways the same words may Fig. 16: Paul Klee, Dynamic Density, in Notebooks , Volume 1 : The Thinking Eye, ed. Jurg Spiller, trans. Ralph 64 be represented. If a specific Manheim (New York: George Wittenborn, 1961 ), 29. word is unreadable, we will

make educated guesses depending on the context, and against graphic means of communication. And though the configurations 65 our own set of expectations about what its meaning might be. they devised were ones to which human beings were already

This inclination even allows us to read misspelled words accu- predisposed to respond, those predispositions were sharply rein- 66 rately, and, occasionally, even to overlook the misspelling. forced during exposure to the specific alphabets codified in their

Outside conscious awareness, then, our brain continuously enter- native cultures. tains and tests multiple alternatives, discarding some, accepting So much so, that, just as our sensitivity to some configura-

others, until a reasonable interpretation emerges. The ability to tions intensifies, our sensitivity to others atrophies. Under cultural

perceive invariance, incidentally, is another trait we have inher- conditioning, we grow highly adept at detecting the minor dif-

ited through evolution: an animal unable to detect the same ferences between letters in our own writing system, to the detri-

71 predator or prey under different conditions or from different van- ment of our ability to detect those in others. Even if letters were tage points will have little chance of survival. Accordingly, we are originally extrapolated from topographical landmarks, we regis-

especially sensitive to letters such as T, Y, or L precisely because ter the configurations of our own alphabets in such a localized

they correspond to salient aspects of the physical environment- part of the brain that they are understood as qualitatively differ-

in other words, aspects that tend to display greater invariance ent from the very natural forms from which they were originally

(allegedly, even macaque monkeys have neurons that fire when adapted. Letters, in effect, form a world unto themselves and are 67 looking at similar shapes). processed in a different part of the brain than numbers, though

Letters such as T, Y, or L also resemble junctions: environmen- their configurations may be remarkably similar (and even inter- 72 tal features where different physical planes meet, thus signaling changeable across different languages). With all due respect 68 important landmarks to remember or obstacles to negotiate. to Franciscono, then, letters and landscape structures are not "a 73 Apparently, Klee grasped spatial relationships in similar terms; in single kind of being." As far as Villa R (fig. 13) is concerned,

his Notebooks, he illustrated analyses of visual tensions in the up- Rainer Crone, attuned to Klee's penchant for disjunction, seems

down, left-right directions by approximating letters such as H, T, to be on the right track when he states that the R "steps uneas- 69 or L (fig. 16). In his Diaries, he likewise remarked that lines func- ily into the landscape. ..the R is of a different order, a different

70 74 tion "as frontiers between areas of different tonalities or colors." dimension, than the rest of the scene." When learning another

It therefore stands to reason that, as our ancestors invented writ- language, especially one whose alphabet does not correspond

ing systems, they appropriated shapes to which they had grown to our own, we notice these different "orders" or "dimensions"

especially sensitive through evolution. Piggybacking on our inher- straightaway: in effect, we strain to learn and remember new

ent sensitivity to detect topographical junctions in the environ- configurations whose meanings at first escape us, reliving, as it

ment, they adapted crucial survival skills when inventing a new, were, the time when we first learned to read, and re-experience

71 Dehaene, Reading in the Brain, 21 ff.

64 Dehaene, Reading in the Brain, 18. 72 Ibid., 56.

65 Ibid., 23. 73 Franciscono, Paul Klee, 180.

66 Ibid., 47. 74 Rainer Crone, "Cosmic Fragments of Meaning: On the Syllables of Paul

67 Ibid., 121. Klee," in Paul Klee: Legends of the Sign, ed. Rainer Crone and Joseph Leo

68 Ibid., 137ff. Koerner (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 32. Marianne Vo-

69 Klee, The Thinking Eye, 29. gel seems to concur in Zwischen Wort und Bild, 132, and Aichele in Paul 70 Klee, Diaries, #842. Klee's Pictorial Writing, 62. the struggle to differentiate a set of unfamiliar symbols and its corresponding sounds. 116 As is well known, Klee was fascinated with the state of child-

hood. "I begin to execute forms," he confessed, "as if I knew noth-

ing about painting. ..like a self-taught man, without looking left or 75 76 right." He even described himself as a "childish man." To be

sure, claims of this kind—throwing conventions to the wind and

seeing the world with complete naivete, like a child—were voiced

by so many modern artists as to take on the status of pedestrian

cliches. But in Klee's case, these statements indicate more than

mere rhetorical posturing or grandstanding. One could make the

argument that the artist frustrates our natural desire to discern

meaning, not so much by reverting to childhood as by forcing

us to revisit the state when reading was not the effortless activity

we take for granted as mature adults, but the slow and arduous

task it is for pre-literate children. Our inability to "read" Handbill

for Comedians (fig. 10) can be attributed, arguably, not just to

our having no frame of reference to decode the "hieroglyphs,"

but also to our inability to contextualize the marks. Some are

figural elements; others are letters; others still appear completely

abstract. As such, they do not form a consistent, interpretable

system. If a surrounding context permits us to decipher misspelled

words, or those scribbled in particularly bad handwriting, Klee's

piece offers so little contextual assistance that one begins to sus-

pect that it was specifically concocted to frustrate, not facilitate,

interpretation. Fig. 17: Paul Klee, Ad Marginem (upside down), 1930/210. This frustration also dispels the mistaken notion that, because Watercolor on varnish-primed cardboard nailed to a stretcher, 46 x 36 of their pictographic quality, hieroglyphs evince greater transpar- cm, Kunstmuseum Basel. ency than arbitrary signs. On the contrary, hieroglyphs required

considerable time and effort to decipher, especially those that such simple, rudimentary forms that it is impossible to determine 78 designate, not an object or animal, but an idea. In fact, it is whether they are indeed letters, pictorial elements, or both. To

precisely because of their semantic inconsistency and relative make matters worse, Klee combined such ambiguous shapes

opacity that hieroglyphs have progressively disappeared from with pictographic forms, thus deliberately reversing the historical

most writing systems (even the Egyptians developed simpler evolution of writing from hieroglyphs to alphabets. Resurrecting

forms of graphic communication for everyday use). In a code its antecedent, pictographic origins, the artist hints at some secret

where a different sign represents a different object or idea, the message to be decoded, yet, seeking to imbue his art with a

reader—since objects or ideas are potentially limitless— must com- sense of mystery, withholds that meaning from the beholder. In

mit hundreds of signs to memory, making writing and reading effect, Klee injected his own archaeologically informed insights

accessible only to those who can devote inordinate amounts of into his art to evoke the beginnings of things—specifically, criti-

time to study. Not surprisingly, the majority of individuals living cal aspects of the earliest codified writing systems—but in ways

in cultures employing hieroglyphic or pictographic scripts are that were deliberately nebulous (one thinks of Jean Laude's term 79 80 illiterate. On the other hand, if a limited number of letters were "fictive archaeology" or Claude Frontisi's "pseudo-ecriture" ).

devised—say, some thirty or so—whose combination represent If we revisit Ad Marginem (fig. 8) with these ideas in mind,

the majority (or even all) of the sounds emitted in the spoken we readily concede that the individual letters, r, u, v, /, are clearly

language, then the system is self-contained, easy to learn, and legible. But given that, contrary to everyday experience, plants

infinitely expandable. While inventing his fictive signs, however— are sprouting from all four edges of the work, and that, in full

we dare not use the term "system"— Klee deliberately resisted this defiance of gravity, a bird walks upside down at the upper bor-

tendency. His signs are unreadable, but, as Joseph Leo Koerner der of the painting, it may be reasonable to speculate that Klee

puts it, still "recognizable as writing. They cannot be mistaken invites his audience to peruse the work from all four possible ori- 77 for 'mere' decoration." Koerner's observation is sound, but so

is Marianne Vogel's warning—that an O, an X, or a V comprise

78 Vogel, Zwischen Wort und Bild, 121. 75 Klee, Diaries, #425, #429. 79 Laude, "Paul Klee," 384.

76 Ibid., #431. For the contemporary interest in the child, see also Francis- 80 Claude Frontisi, "Klee pictographe," in Les Pictographes: L'Esthetique de

cono, Paul Klee, 92ff. I'icone au XXeme siecle, Didier Ottinger et al. (Les Sables d'Olonne: Musee

77 Koerner, "Paul Klee and the Image of the Book," in Legends of the Sign, 66. de I'Abbaye Sainte-Croix, 1992), 64. tation (fig. 17), foregrounding the arbitrariness of their design all 83 the more. It also means that, when orientation is altered, our detection of invariance is considerably weaker when it comes 117 to letters than to other features of the environment, probably

because reading was invented so late in our evolutionary histo- 84 ry. Though we recognize natural forms with no difficulty when

reversed, we need to tilt our necks to read the spines of books,

and, experience great difficulty deciphering texts printed upside

down. Again, we would be in a position not dissimilar to that of

children learning letters for the first time, a position in which Klee

cleverly connives to place us. This interpretation might also jibe

with an argument posited by Andrew Kagan: that Klee's work

and philosophy were informed by the eighteenth-century musical

theorist Johann Josef Fux's treatise, Gradus ad Parnassum, from - Fig. 18: Joseph Jastrow ( 1 863 1944), Do You See a Duck or a Rabbit, which one of Klee's own pieces, Ad Parnassum, was partially or Either?, in "The Mind's Eye," Popular Science Monthly 54 (1899): 312. inspired. Although this is not the place to review Kagan's con-

tribution, suffice to say that Fux's ambition was to lay out, for

music theory and composition, a "method similar to that by which

children learn first letters, then syllables, and finally how to read 85 and write."

But as fascinated as Klee was with the learning process, he

ostensibly relished its enhancement less than its undoing. It was

stated earlier that, as we learn to read, we become highly sen-

sitized to the minute distinctions among letters in our alphabet.

Just as importantly, we are equally sensitized to recognize faces,

though both letters and faces are processed in different parts 86 of the brain. For all intents and purposes, faces are one thing,

letters another. (In a way this mutual-exclusivity recalls our abil-

ity to see rabbits and ducks [fig. 18], or faces and vases, in the same image, but not both simultaneously.) Klee, of course, had

no access to MRI machines, nor could he observe how the brain

absorbs different forms of information in real time. Even so, with

no cognizance of the latest findings in neuroscience, Klee, ever

the rabble-rouser, sought to confuse those very circuits by con-

structing faces out of letters (fig. 19). To be sure, combining a

variety of disparate elements to form human figures is a common

practice in his overall production—as in To Make Visible (plate

59) and The Order of High C (fig. 11); but examples such as

Fig. 19: Paul Klee, Wl (In Memoriam), 1938/135. Watercolor, Death and Fire ( Tod und Feuer) (1940; fig. 20) are especially

gouache and plaster on burlap, 52 x 45.5 cm, sold at Christie's Nov. emblematic of the artist's tendency to induce ambiguity by con- 6, 2008. flating facial features with linguistic elements. In the main figure,

the two eyes, nose, and mouth of the face are composed by the

81 entations. (In his Notebooks, he even mentions the possibility letters T, O, D—the word "Tod," German for death. Thus, even as

of uniting multiple perspectives "into a single median collective faces and letters are processed in different parts of the brain, and 82 viewpoint." Notice that, in Ad Margine plants and animals register as fundamentally different entities, Klee collapses both, ) m,

are still easily readable even if located upside down—the celestial running afoul of our expectations and, as if by design, under-

sphere requires no commentary, of course, because it is perfectly

symmetrical—but letters are completely unreadable at this orien- 83 Michel Butor, "Conference on Word and Image" (Berlin, 1989) discussed

in Jeremy Adler, "Paul Klee as 'Poet-Painter,'" in Art, Word and Image, ed.John Dixon Hunt, David Lomas, and Michael Corris (London: Reaktion

81 For another example, see Landscape with Yellow Birds ( Landschaft mit gel- Books, 2010), 178-79.

ben Vogeln which James Smith Pierce connects to sources in folk 84 Dehaene, Reading in the Brain, 18-21. ) (1923), art (Pierce, Klee and Primitive Art, 14) as well as Klee, The Thinking Eye, 40. 85 Johann Josef Fux, Steps to Parnassus: The Study of Counterpoint, trans. Al-

As early as 1 908, moreover, Klee admitted to turning works upside down to fred Mann (New York: Norton, 1943), 17; see Andrew Kagan, "Paul Klee's

"stress lines as feeling directs" (Felix Klee, ed., Paul Klee: His Life and Work 'Ad Parnassum': The Theory and Practice of Eighteenth-Century Polyphony

in Documents [New York: George Braziller, 1962], 14). as Models for Klee's Art," Arts Magazine 52, no. 1 (Sept. 1977): 92.

82 Klee, The Thinking Eye, 159. 86 Dehaene, Reading in the Brain, 76 - 78. mines our ability to read and decipher. Perhaps he even found

such a disconcerting combination specifically appropriate for a 118 suggestion of mortality, though this question must remain an open one.

Klee even reveled in disjunction while orchestrating dis-

parate signs to converge into a consistent meaning. In Child

Consecrated to Suffering (fig. 12), we had already mentioned

that Klee devised a scenario where meaning and sound reinforce

each other (since the letter W is pronounced "Weh" in German, the same sound as the word for "suffering"). But neuroscientists

have discovered that the reception of meaning (the lexical route)

and the reception of sound (the phonic route) are actually quite

dissimilar, again taking different paths toward different areas

in the brain. Proficient readers do not fully pronounce words to

understand them—that is inefficient and time consuming; instead,

they take the lexical route and recall meanings instantly. Only

when a word is especially long, complex, and unfamiliar do they

decelerate their reading and take the phonic route by enunciat-

87 ing every syllable, almost the way a child reads. The lexical

route not only proves more efficient; it also confers a number of

advantages. In English, for example, the letter B is pronounced

Fig. 20: Paul Klee, Death and Fire ( Tod und Feuer 1940/332. Oil the same way as the verb "to be" and the insect "bee." These ), and colored paste on burlap, 46.7 x 44.6 cm, Zentrum Paul Klee, words have the same sound, though completely different mean- Bern. ings—an ambiguity that is effortlessly registered by adults, but that

children master only with time. That spelling is so irregular seems of Klee's combining two radically different routes to meaning (lex- 89 illogical, even downright frustrating, especially when sound trans- ical and phonetic just as he required us, in Death and Fire, to )

lates so inconsistently in writing. Yet these incongruities serve a engage two different brain mechanisms (reading language and

valuable purpose: helping us to identify meanings with greater recognizing faces) to interpret the same form.

rapidity. If the letter B, the verb "to be," and the insect "bee" were Accordingly, Klee's employment of letters that evoke sounds

all spelled the same way (i.e., as they are pronounced), greater should be clearly differentiated from his invented pictographs

contextual information would be required to understand which that do not. In spite of its ambiguity and simplicity, the W in

sense was intended each time we encountered these words. We Child Consecrated to Suffering qualifies as an example of "full"

may commit more spelling mistakes employing a linguistic system or "complete" writing: i.e., writing that 1) has a communicative

with numerous homonyms, but at least meanings are accessible purpose, 2) consists of graphic marks on a durable surface, and 88 90 with greater dispatch. 3) relates conventional marks to articulate speech. Most early

But even though spelling is considerably more transparent in versions of writing, as well as the majority of Klee's pseudo-

German than in English, were it not for the title, we would experi- alphabetic marks, might fulfill at least one of these criteria, but

ence difficulty interpreting the W in Child Consecrated to Suffering. rarely all three—and would therefore qualify only as "incomplete

Klee obviously did not mean the mark on the child's forehead to writing." Although most art consists of graphic marks on a lasting

be read with greater dispatch. To register its meaning, we need to surface created for the purpose of communication, it is undeni-

revert to that more primitive way of reading: namely, by thinking able that, in Child Consecrated to Suffering, the letter W relates

of the pronunciation of the letter (the phonic route) rather than to conventional speech. This condition obviously applies to High

simply recording its meaning (the lexical one). It remains unclear, and Shining Stands the Moon and Once Risen from the Gray of

moreover, whether the W should be read only as the word "Weh," Night (figs. 3 and 4), since these pieces are "illuminations" of

or also as a frown on the child's face, an abstract form, or all of poems written out by the artist in full, but it might also apply to

the above. Alternatively, the image might function as a rebus: as Death and Fire (fig. 20) and to Serpent's Prey ( Schlangenbeutej "<®> when V U" means: "I love you," but no other part of the piece (1926; plate 35). In the latter, the letter S not only imitates the

conforms to this reading. As it is, only the letter W is meant to be snake's sinuous form, as well as the first letter of the animal's

pronounced phonetically. Klee, then, was absolutely correct to name, but its pronunciation also recalls its hissing sound. Note

insist that all visual art begins with a title because, in its absence, that, unlike the W in Child Consecrated to Suffering, the phonetic

the intended meaning of the W would most likely have escaped connection works in numerous languages: e.g., "Schlange" in

his audience. In which case, the image provides another example

89 Ibid., 115.

87 Ibid., 27. 90 Steven Roger Fisher, A Flistory of Writing (London: Reaktion Books, 2005),

88 Ibid., 29ff. 12 . 119

Fig. 23: Phaistos Disk, Minoan Bronze Age (c. 1600 BCE). Fired clay, 15 (diam.) cm, Heraklion Archaeological Museum, Crete.

German, "serpent" in French, "snake" in English, or "serpiente"

in Spanish. Serpent's Prey might thus represent one of those few

instances where letter, sound, meaning, and literal shape all man-

age to converge—few, because the word for snake, of course,

Fig. 21: Paul Klee, Flowers in Stone ( Blumen in Stein), 1939/638. Oil does not even begin with an S in all languages using Latin on cardboard, 50 x 39.8 cm, Stiftung Sammlung Bernhard Sprengel, script. Incidentally, the Egyptian hieroglyph for snake became Hanover. transformed through the Proto-Sinaitic, Phoenician, early Greek,

91 Greek, and Latin alphabets into our letter N, not S.

KLEE AND THE HISTORY OF W RITI NG Though unacquainted with present-day neuroscience, Klee

was familiar with the history of writing. And, one presumes, with

the multi-directionality of some early scripts, where one line could

read from left to right, the second from right to left, and so on.

This condition clearly pertains to "hieroglyphic" pieces such as

Handbill for Comedians (fig. 10), since, unlike examples of Latin

script, the direction in which the work should be "read" remains

unclear. James Smith Pierce argued, moreover, that Klee appro-

priated the employment of the spiral form in pieces such as, say,

in ( in Stein fig. the Flowers Stone Blumen ) (1939; 21 ) or bottom

right corner of Untitled (Still Life ( Ohne Titel [ Stillleben ) ]) (1940;

fig. 22) from the "folk practice of inlaying table-tops with con-

trasting woods or marbles of various colors representing knives, 92 forks, spoons." But Klee may also have known the configuration

of early alphabets found on, say, the Cretan Phaistos Disk of c.

1600 BCE (fig. 23). In his Notebooks, he studied the develop-

ment of movement in multiple directions, and subjected writing, 93 not just to spiral, but also to mirror reversal, as we have already

seen in Drawing Knotted in the Manner of a Net (fig. 7). This

91 Ibid., 48. Fig. 22: Paul Klee, Untitled (Still Life) ( Ohne Titel [Stillleben]), 1940. Oil 92 Pierce, Klee and Primitive Art, 20. on canvas, 100 x 80.5 cm, private collection. 93 Klee, The Thinking Eye, 42 7; Briefe, 2: 1 1 05. , ,

1 Alvao | JsM/ t $ AZ V WA ~J 1 H n W 4 Agyplisch X r2 tj E vs V V H tA Allgrwchrsch X Y A E N V M 1 H r Dberisch A $ Y a £ M* r 1 H r AUphonikisch A A w A- H L Punisch H * * A 1 H, i Uwnen txj Y t> A E A M < 1 N r AIvao Vk m m m n 3 >4 A J Y A V V Agyphsch t Eh (ED V Attgnechisch H L K rr A V 3b«risch UJ K A Altphomkiwh v\ 3 3 B >i 1 A Punisch S * A a > r Y A Reman A K YK A

Fig. 25: Karl Weule (1864- 1926), Comparative Compilation of

Characters, in Vom Kerbstock zum Alphabet (Stuttgart: Kosmos, 1915), 40.

Fig. 26: Paul Klee, Exercise in Capital Letters (Jan. 9, 1922), in The Thinking Eye 215.

Fig. 24: Paul Klee, Pastorale (Rhythms) ( Pastorale [Rhythmen]), hands in practice, "for the left works differently from the right. It is 1927/20. Tempera on canvas mounted on wood, 69.3 x 52.4 cm, not so deft, and for that reason sometimes of more use to you. The The Museum of Modern Art, NY, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Fund and right hand writes more naturally, the left more hierog lyphically. exchange, 157.1945. Good handwriting, however, is not mere accuracy, but expres- way, he not simply undermined the Western tradition of one-point sion (keep the Chinese in mind) and with exercise it will grow 96 perspective, and indulged in his love of opposing movement and more sensitive, more spiritual." In fact, Klee himself wrote with

94 97 counter-movement; he also turned back the historical clock by his right hand but painted with his left, and, according to his resurrecting a freer, less restrictive aspect of setting (and read- son, Felix, "could do mirror-writing nimbly and correctly with his 98 ing) information. As languages became more standardized, such left hand." He sometimes reversed words in his works—such as

"51 W" inconsistencies were gradually corrected, though Klee probably "WIR" into 1 in The Angel and the Distribution of Presents 99 disapproved of these "corrections," judging them to have robbed (der Engel und die Bescherung) —and was also very attentive language of the creative force it shared with visual art, perhaps to the way Felix learned language: the sounds he emitted, the prompting him to adapt less restrictive configurations in Flowers mishaps he made as he mimicked his parents' words, and, even 100 in Stone or Untitled (Still Life). Given the diversity of his produc- more importantly for our purposes, the syllables he inverted. tion, however, he still condescended to implement some of these Along these lines, it is intriguing that, at a specific moment

corrective devices in Pastorale Rhythms ( Pastorale [Rhythmen]) in time, some writing systems—such as the Brahmi, Greek, and ( ) of 1927 (fig. 24), inserting bands in between the rows of script, Latin—completely changed the orientation of select letters. Used 95 much like a musical score. All the same, though the lines are no differently than before, they were simply reversed as though

101 clearly distinguished from one another, their directionality still reflected in a mirror. Weule's Vom Kerbstock zum Alphabet remains unclear, to say nothing of their meaning. included a diagram clearly showing some of these reversals (fig.

Though obviously not a professional linguist, Klee must have 25). James Smith Pierce even illustrated this very diagram and understood the ambi-directionality of some early scripts. In 1938, Klee's Bauhaus studies (fig. 26) in the same article, but without he executed a painting combining arbitrary signs with hieroglyphs, bedecked with arrows pointing both left and right, which he appropriately called nach rechts, nach links (To the Right 96 See Grohmann, Paul Klee, 374-75. To the Left). He also recommended that his students keep both 97 Klee, The Thinking Eye, 427.

98 Klee, Hi s Life and Work, 50.

99 Vogel, Zwischen Wort und Bild, 131.

94 Vogel, Zwischen Wort und Bild, 142-43. 100 Klee, Diaries, #858. 95 Laude, "Paul Klee," 368-69. 101 See Fisher, A History of Writing, 126, 137. 102 drawing a direct connection between them. The reason for Why? Arguably, because Klee cleverly made them conform to these alphabetic changes is unclear; perhaps some scribes found both the visual and manual constraints under which most forms some letters still recognizable—i.e. detectable as invariant—yet of writing operate: their configuration is compact enough to be ; easier to write in reverse. As other scribes concurred, the innova- easily written, their size is neither too small nor too large to tax tion spread like an epidemic throughout their respective cultures. the retina's scanning ability, and regular intervals are inserted in

Regardless, Klee's cognizance of these reversals should expand between them to exclude overlap, permitting the reader to dif-

112 the range of his configurations that can legitimately be called ferentiate element from element.

"letters," or at least answer Marianne Vogel's question as to Yet, if some provide only the "look" or "feel" of writing, is Smith whether a reversed 8 or mirror-reflected J should be considered Pierce justified in calling Klee's hieroglyphic markings "forgeries"

103 113 114 a letter or an abstract form. and "caprices," or Laude a "lure," a "form of deception"?

It goes without saying, moreover, that, in order to be adopted Though severe, these terms, given the artist's love of irony and within any writing system, alphabetic characters must respect ambiguity, are apposite. Klee's hybrid combinations, after all, limitations governing human physical dexterity and be relatively seem to be specifically concocted to generate mixed signals, easy to outline. Any character too time-consuming to set down induce uncertainty, and frustrate our low tolerance for meaning- becomes a good candidate for simplification or elimination. Not lessness. But, from the other side, might not this frustration also surprisingly, historians of writing have remarked that, despite play a constructive role in, and contribute to, the overall mean- their superficial differences, most alphabetic systems throughout ing of Klee's work? Earlier, Adorno was cited as having labeled the world betray noticeable similarities: the majority of charac- Klee's markings "hieroglyphic," the code for which "has been

104 115 ters are compact and can be outlined in a few strokes. And lost, a loss that plays into its content." On this account, perhaps they must also be neither too large nor too small to overtax the Klee's failure to signify actually signifies, its very meaninglessness

105 scanning capacity of our retina. Joseph Leo Koerner was cited proves meaningful. To this author's mind, this line of investigation above as saying that, though many of Klee's signs are unread- seems highly promising, though Adorno unfortunately refrained able, they are "recognizable as writing. They cannot be mis- from exploring his own insight, and did not explain how the loss 106 taken for 'mere' decoration." Aichele also argued that Klee of meaning creates meaning in the works of Klee. exploited "the potential inherent" in graphic forms of represen- May we turn to neuroscience for assistance? Curiously, 107 tation "that resembled writing but could not be read." These though reading and writing are synonymous with the transfer statements are persuasive, but it is also worth asking: how exactly of information, these now ordinary and commonplace activities do we recognize Klee's markings as writing, especially if they are, for all that, not fully comprehended by science. How the 108 are unreadable? Why do they not simply strike us as abstract human brain registers small markings as syllables, words, and marks? As Jean Laude put it, writing invites reading, but, here, sentences, capable of inciting, say, all the meanings and emo- there is nothing to read, if, by reading, of course, we mean scan- tions we experience while reading literature, is still a source of 109 ning arbitrary marks that convey codified meanings. Might not wonder even (nay, especially) to neuroscientists. Paradoxically, the very definition of writing mandate that it be readable? On insofar as brain functioning is concerned, scientific knowledge this account, even the term "sign," if used in the Saussurian sense, frequently advances when something goes awry. If a patient i.e., comprising both a signifierand a signified, both of which are loses an ability or skill after a stroke or accident, localizing any arbitrary and conventional, proves altogether inappropriate in anatomical damage identifies which part of the brain governs

110 Klee's case. To qualify as signs, the marks would need to be that ability or skill. Predictably, when specific areas are injured, decodable—at least to someone. patients—again, regardless of culture, linguistic ability, or the writ-

On this very point, Jean Laude interjected that, though it may ing system learned— lose the ability to recognize and differenti- not hold true in every case, Klee's markings betray little if any ate the letters of their own alphabets, robbing them of their abil-

116 repetition, which would be expected of any working alphabetic ity to read. Might a similar motivation, on a cognitive rather

111 code. One would have to concede, therefore, that many of than anatomical level, underlie Klee's ostensible deployment of

Klee's inscriptions, at least those that are undecipherable, qualify illegibility? Many of the characteristics he exploited in his pic- neither as language nor as signs in the strict sense of the term. torial use of language—the reliance on pictographs and hiero-

Even so, Koerner and Aichele are still on to something: even if glyphs, the approximation of letters and topographical features, they are not, the markings have the "look" or "feel" of writing. the ambi-directionality of script—were gradually eliminated from

writing systems, primarily to dispel ambiguity and inject greater

clarity in the communicative process. By reintroducing these char- 102 Pierce, "Pictographs, Ideograms, and Alphabets," 222, 226. acteristics, things. 103 Vogel, Zwischen Wort und Bild, 122. Klee was suggesting the beginnings of (As

104 Dehaene, Reading in the Brain, 177. Martin Heidegger declared: "The beginning is the strangest and 105 Ibid., 13-18.

106 Koerner, "Paul Klee and the Image of the Book," in Legends of the Sign, 66.

107 Aichele, Paul Klee's Pictorial Writing, 196. 112 Dehaene, Reading in the Brain, 174ff. 108 See Temkin, "Paul Klee and the Avant-Garde," 28. 113 Pierce, "Pictographs, Ideograms, and Alphabets," 223. 109 Laude, "Paul Klee," 382. 114 Laude, "Paul Klee," 389.

110 See also Vogel, Zwischen Wort und Bild, 125. 115 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 124.

111 Laude, "Paul Klee," 388. 116 Dehaene, Reading in the Brain, 54ff. Receptive field Brain area Coded units Examples of preferred stimuli it also encodes information size and structure 118 about its mirror image ,

Small words, ensuring that we recognize it Left occipito- T £ E N extent 122 frequent temporal sulcus? EN NT TENT from other angles, and under- substrings * -48) CONTENT (y and morphemes TN e:t stand that a different contour does not denote a different

119 object . But what is advanta- Left occipito- temporal sulcus? Local bigrams geous in one context may be * N (y -56) detrimental in another. The

very sensitivity to invariance

that ensures survival in our

Bilateral physical environment actually area V8? = impedes our ability to read. (y -64) Small children frequently con-

fuse the letter b with the letter

d, and often spontaneously

write in reverse. Of course, no Bilateral Letter shapes

area V4? (case-specific) human body is perfectly sym-

metrical, and most individuals

are right-handed, implying

that one side is invariably

Bilateral Local contours privileged in our left/right area V2 (letter fragments) orientation. Even so, similar mistakes have been observed

the world over, irrespective of

culture or alphabetic system

120 used . Fascinated by his own

son's process of learning lan- Bilateral Oriented bars area VI guage, and by his inversion

of syllables, Klee must have

sensed something of the ten-

sion between our biological Bilaleral instincts the social con- thalamus and Local contrasts (lateral V ventions of reading and writ- geniculate) ing. Although speaking comes

naturally 121 reading does Fig. 27: Stanislas Dehaene (b. 1965), Hypothetical Model for the Neuronal Hierarchy Supporting Visual ,

Word Recognition, in Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention (New York: not. And even if children out- Viking, 2009), 151. grow their difficulties—except

for those stricken with severe

mightiest. What comes afterward is. ..[an] inability to retain the learning disabilities—the problems they face while learning to

7 beginning."" But was he also attempting to understand how read tell us a great deal about the mind. Specifically, how arti- )

language works by depriving it of its strange, mighty power to ficial and contrived reading and writing actually are, and, even

communicate? if ancient biological abilities have been adapted to this new

The mirror reversal of the Brahmi, Greek, and Latin scripts, skill, performing it may require leaving some of our own primary

for example, echoed in several of the Bauhaus exercises, cannot instincts behind, not least of which is our acute sensitivity to what

122 be ascribed exclusively to the greater ease with which charac- is invariant in symmetrical images .

ters might be jotted down in reverse. There must be something In keeping with his penchant to reverse the hands of time,

about mirror symmetry that proves salient to our condition as it was, no doubt, an attempt—however intuitive—to recover

embodied beings—even before culture makes its indelible mark something of the ambidexterity of the pre-reading brain that

upon us. In the wild, for instance, an ability to identify predator

or prey regardless of vantage point is a distinctive advantage. In 1 1 8 Dehaene, Reading in the Brain, 272.

fact, whenever the brain encodes information about an object, 119 Ibid., 132.

120 Ibid., 264.

121 See Stephen Pinker, The Language Instinct (New York: Harper Perennial,

117 Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics (New Haven: Yale Univer- 1995).

sity Press, 1959), 155. 122 Dehaene, Reading in the Brain, 266ff. Klee hoped to tap by prompting his students to draw with both hands, or subjecting letters to mirror symmetry experiments in his LANGUAGE AND MOVEMENT

Bauhaus studies. Even more startling, and difficult to explain, is An important element unaddressed in Dehaene's diagram, how those same studies closely resemble a diagram Stanislas yet directly relevant to any investigation of Klee's aesthetic pro-

Dehaene devised (fig. 27) to distinguish the different areas of duction, is how the brain processes the very physicality of writing. the brain, and the hierarchical levels and discrete degrees of As intimated above, the limited space the retina registers at any specialization, at which neurons detect contrasts, contours, char- given moment constrains reading just as the size and range of our acter shapes, individual letters, consonants, entire words and hand and wrist motion constrains writing. All the same, writing, word combinations—the very neuronal chain of command, as it in our culture at least, varies from highly regimented, mechanical

123 were, that sets the process of reading into motion. Since Klee typeface to the most spontaneous forms of calligraphy, the latter was unacquainted with these findings, any similarity between often displaying no less variety and expressivity than individual his pedagogical sketches (fig. 26) and present-day diagrams strokes on a painted canvas. of brain mechanisms responsible for language comprehension Prone to experiment, Klee varied the technique with which

128 is purely accidental, and, most likely, would never have been he executed his marks. Sometimes, he courted a typographic noticed by the present author were it not for the letter E being quality, leaving the impression that his manner was impersonal used in both cases. But Klee was not insensitive to the way the and unemotional; at other times, he nearly incised his marks into brain processes information. In notes published under the rubric thickly applied layers of paint, like a scribe writing on a clay

Pedagogical Sketchbook, he intimated that our vision is limited, tablet as old as the script itself (fig. 24). By evoking a distant that the eye cannot scan entire surfaces with equal intensity. "The past, Klee endowed some of his images, as Charles Haxthausen limitation of the eye," he writes, "is its inability to see even a small has argued, with a certain "auratic" quality, as if his piece, surface equally sharp at all points. The eye must 'graze' over the rare and priceless, warranted preservation in an archaeologi-

129 surface, grasping sharply portion after portion, to convey them cal museum. Perchance, Klee appreciated writing's ability to

124 to the brain which collects and stores the impressions." Present- give ideas a lasting physical presence they do not otherwise 130 day neuroscientists call these eye movements "saccades"—also possess, a dichotomy that also evokes the lag between having acknowledging that the eye takes in impressions only part to part, an immaterial idea and its literal inscription, the temporariness and then remits those impressions to the brain, where they finally of one and the endurance of the other. But even as they leave coalesce into holistic impressions. These limitations constrain our enduring physical traces behind, different scripts do not perdure reading ability, since we are able to identify only about ten or equally. Ancient languages can bequeath a set of symbols for 125 twelve letters per saccade. Intriguingly, Jean Laude writes that posterity even as they themselves become extinct: e.g., although

Klee was describing a procedure analogous to that of reading we still use Latin script in Western Europe and the Americas, the 126 in the proper sense of the term, in which case, the similarity original language has fallen out of common usage. This discrep- between Klee's Bauhaus studies and Dehaene's diagram may ancy between the permanent and the impermanent, the graphic not be that coincidental after all. marks and their meanings, might have intrigued Klee, perhaps

If permitted to speculate as to what this similarity might signify, because this condition approximates that of art. If written long one could propose that, just as Klee regressed from the alpha- ago, an inscription's message, for all intents and purposes, is sub- betic to the hieroglyphic, from the unidirectional to the multi-direc- ject to erosion, even loss. The same applies to works of art, even tional, and from the lexical to the phonic, he also stymied full those created in the present, if the audience remains insensitive access to word identity. Given his propensity, as Aichele so aptly to the artist's worldview. Feeling misunderstood, Klee could have put it, for "syntactical peculiarities that have a particularly disori- associated his work with ancient scripts whose markings endure

127 enting effect," then, in that same spirit, Klee concocted scenar- physically, but whose meanings do not. Even as he forged these ios that, though unbeknownst to him, derailed the functioning of associations, transcribing such scripts literally and factually in his neural mechanisms that support word recognition. Allowing us— work was unfeasible. Unfeasible, not simply because Klee was

131 just barely—to recognize letters, but prohibiting them from forming no plagiarist, but because he could not exclude their poten- consonants, let alone intelligible words or word combinations, tial decipherment in the future, in which case his point about the

Klee manufactured a kind of cerebral traffic jam. Beneath his erosion of meaning would be defeated. To mark the erasure of art's look of innocence, and his apparent playful temperament, meaning, Klee, ironically enough, had to erase meaning from his

Klee labored to hold our full understanding in check, perhaps marks. hoping to learn something, however rudimentary or basic, from A similar interest may have motivated him to combine antithet- the frustration or lack of fulfillment experienced as a result.

128 Vogel, Zwischen Wort und Bild, 136. 129 See also Charles Werner Haxthausen, "Zwischen Darstellung und Parodie:

123 Ibid., 151. Klees 'auratische' Bilder," in Paul Klee: Kunst und Karriere; Beitrage des

124 Paul Klee, Pedagogical Sketchbook, trans. Sibyl Maholy-Nagy (New York: internationalen Symposiums in Bern, ed. Oskar Batschmann and Josef Hel- Praeger, 1953), 33. fenstein (Bern: Stampfli, 2000), 9-26.

125 Dehaene, Reading in the Brain, 16. 130 Klee, The Thinking Eye, 17. See also Paul Klee, "Philosophie de la creation,"

126 Laude, "Paul Klee," 365. in Theorie de Part moderne (Paris: Gonthier-Meditation, 1964), 58. 127 Aichele, Paul Klee's Pictorial Writing, 208. 131 Aichele, Paul Klee's Pictorial Writing, 185. D«r Cupfinal Grasshoppers-Servetic 124 unanUthleden—

Fig. 29: Paul Klee, Embrace Umgriff 1939/1121. Paste color, ( ),

watercolor, and oil on paper, 24 x 131 cm, Collection Dr. Bernhard Sprengel, Hanover.

135 surrealist automatism as abstract expressionism.

Given his fascination with beginnings, Klee's interest in spon-

taneity might have been piqued by the gestural characteristics of

children's drawings. As James Smith Pierce wrote: "The first marks Weir bgistuncgen KERZEN made by a child, as Klee learned from watching his son Felix, are only meaningless scribbles. There is no question of representa-

tion. The lines are nothing more than visual records of manual

motions and at first the child is not even aware of the connection

between the motion and the marks." 136 Not surprisingly, among

the key concerns Klee voiced in his Notebooks was for move-

Fig. 28: Paul Klee, Alphabet I, 1938/187. Colored paste on ment: "the active movement from us to the work; the communica- newspaper on cardboard, 53.9 x 34.4 cm, Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern. 137 tion of the work's mobility to others, the beholders of the work."

In later years, Klee increasingly opted toward a more gestural,

138 ical means of execution, painting freely over newspaper (fig. 28), improvisational mode, perhaps due to a debilitating illness that 139 leaving the mechanically-reproduced print visible underneath, as inhibited his manual dexterity, and, in so doing, established the

though layers of sedimentation had accrued over a body of infor- new style upon which his popularity among European surreal-

mation through time. Reluctant to confine himself to a single tech- ists and American abstract expressionists largely rests. According

nique, Klee combined the personal and the impersonal—what to Clement Greenberg, a champion of this new generation of

was done by hand versus what was done by machine—in the American artists, Klee "would often begin a drawing with no

same visual field. In this respect, of course, his work betrays an definitive intention or idea in mind, guided by nothing but the

unmistakable debt to Picasso and Braque, whose invention of automatic movements of his hand, letting the line go of its own

collage, and incorporation of newsprint in the domain of high accord until it was recaptured by unplanned, accidental resem-

132 art, provide the obvious precedent. Klee broke new ground, blances. These resemblances would be improved upon and

however, by seeking the effect, not of mechanical impersonality elaborated," a process that "recapitulated the very beginnings

or historical impermanence, but of rapid spontaneity (fig. 29). of graphic art, the development from aimless scrawling to the 140 He obviously appreciated the calligraphic quality of writing, hop- representation of recognizable objects."

133 ing to collapse the differences between painting and drawing.

And by giving the impression of working in an improvisational, 135 See Andrew Kagan, "Paul Klee's Influence on American Painting: New even gestural, manner, he stressed the concept of art, not as a York School," Arts Magazine 49, no. 10 (June 1975): 54-59, Carolyn 134 finished product, but as a process, anticipating not so much Lanchner, "Klee in America," in Lanchner, Paul Klee, 83-111, and Helfen- stein and Turner, Klee and America.

136 Pierce, Klee and Primitive Art, 85. 137 Klee, The Thinking Eye, 169.

132 See also Jim M. Jordan, Paul Klee and Cubism (Princeton: Princeton Univer- 138 Ibid., 455.

sity Press, 1 984). 139 See, for example, Robert Kudielka, Paul Klee: The Nature of Creation, 133 Klee, The Thinking Eye, 455. Works 1914-1940 (London: Hayward Gallery, 2002), 161. 134 See Laude, "Paul Klee," 349. 140 Greenberg, "On Paul Klee," 72. .

Although frequently mentioned, scholars have yet to con- among the original motivations behind creativity, Klee insisted, is nect this aspect of Klee's work to the conviction shared by many communication: "the initial impulse in ourselves, the actual pro- present-day linguists that communication originated, not in primi- gressive carrying out of the work itself, and then getting the work 125 141 tive vocalization, but in gesture or signing . Though largely across to others, to the beholders—these are the chief stages of

145 overlooked by art historians, this coincidence provides a critical the creative act ." Intriguingly, and consistent with the present- interpretive nexus where art, language, and cognition intersect, day thesis that language emerged through signing, Klee associ- a nexus that relates directly to Klee's strong interest in the birth ated the birth of writing with motion. "The Genesis of the script," of communication. The primacy of motion, in fact, was never far Klee professed, provides "a splendid parable of movement. The from his mind: "Initially," he wrote, "there is but one principle: work of art, too, is experienced by us first of all as a process of

142 to move ." This proposition seems persuasive enough: even the creation, rather than as a passive product. The creative impulse most basic microscopic organism seems animated by a primor- suddenly springs to life, like a flame, passes through the hand dial urge to stir. Still, from this primitive, instinctual motility to the onto the canvas, where it spreads further until, like the spark that invention of complex forms of communication such as language closes an electric circuit, it returns to its source: the eye and the

146 lies a seemingly unbridgeable gap. Upon reflection, however, mind ." To this end, artists must stress the "expressive motions

147 the growing consensus among present-day linguists that commu- of the brush, the genesis of the effect ." "The work as human nication actually began with rudimentary signing makes perfect action (genesis)," he concludes, "is movement both in the produc-

148 sense. Imagine the following scenario: a group of thirsty hominids tive and the receptive sense ." look to quench their thirst and unexpectedly come upon strang- Thus, though a discussion of gesture might seem irrelevant to ers whose language they find incomprehensible. While emitting Klee's engagement with language, the artist's own association of arbitrary sounds is unlikely to advance communication—because script, movement, and the workings of the mind—in concert with addresser and addressee share no common code—gesture fits the current postulate that language, gesture, and thought are inti- 149 the bill perfectly. The leader of the first group might simulate the mately linked—warrants its inclusion in this study . In addition, act of cupping water, pretending to drink, all the while looking many painters feared visual ideas becoming stale through exces- bemused as if he were desperately in need of something. To sup- sive calculation and re-working; lest an image be spoiled, better ply an appropriately intelligible response, all the leader of the make few preparatory sketches and transcribe one's vision as second group need do is point in the direction of a stream or quickly as possible. Klee endorsed this attitude with a vengeance: pond. And since gestures are interactive, they may be repeated whenever "a type grows beyond the stage of its genesis," he

." 150 as often as is necessary for the desired response to be elicited. declared, "the intensity gets lost very quickly The desire to

Going further back in time, it stands to reason that, within dis- remain improvisational, then, was not simply a visual or techni- crete social groups, language could also have emerged, inde- cal issue: it was, by Klee's own admission, a means to sustain pendently and similarly, as improvisational signing, not as formal the freshness of a work and establish an empathetic relationship discourse. between the observer and the artist's process of creation ("the

Requiring direct eye contact and unfettered hands, sign- communication of the work's mobility to others, the beholders of ing has obvious drawbacks. Vocalizations, on the other hand, the work"). This relationship could allegedly function indepen- reach anyone within earshot and afford the possibility to mul- dently of artistic conventions and even approximate the original titask. No wonder, verbalization gradually overtook signing, act of communication: the birth of language in physical gesture, just as phonetic writing displaced hieroglyphs and pictographs. as a system of signing, not as the manipulation of arbitrary signs,

But even if vocalization eventually won the day—sign language as in vocalization. For Klee, even figuration was "connected

." 151 excepted—many individuals still "speak with their hands," adding with the concept of movement On this point, it might also be gestures to speech for emphasis or rhetorical force. According relevant to add, if only parenthetically, that those very patients to researchers such as David McNeill, however, these are not mentioned above, whose brain injuries prevented them from rec- simply residues of language's more gesticular ancestry; they ognizing letters, could nonetheless manage to write them out by should actually be "regarded as parts of language itself- not as hand, or recognize their outlines if physically traced on their own

152 embellishments or elaborations, but as integral parts of the pro- bodies . It would indeed be difficult to devise a better defense

." 143 cesses of language and its use These issues relate directly to of the intimate link between language and movement.

Klee's art. As is well known, he sought to reinvent painting as if from scratch. "I want to be as though newborn...," he declared, 145 Ibid., 373.

144 146 Ibid., 99. "ignoring facts and fashions, to be almost primitive ." Yet cast- 147 Klee, Diaries, #640. ing off convention was no exercise in radicality for its own sake; 148 Klee, The Thinking Eye, 357.

149 This is not to say, of course, that Klee was the only artist to have connected

physical movement with originary language (even Hugo Ball, a leading Da-

141 See Michael Tomasello, Origins of Human Communication (Cambridge, daist, mused whether sign language was "the real language of paradise"

MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2008). [Ball, Flight out of Time: A Dada Diary (Berkeley: University of California 142 Klee, The Nature of Nature, 13. Press, 1996), 104]). 143 David McNeill, Gesture and Thought (Chicago, University of Chicago 150 Klee, Dianes, #928. Press, 2007), 13. 151 Klee, The Nature of Nature, 26.

144 Grohmann, Paul Klee, 41 152 Dehaene, Reading in the Brain, 57. ) —

iehen alt ein Auqe &uf zroei Beinen l&ufend 1~L

Fig. 31 : Explanation of the Chinese Character for "Seeing," in Weule, Vom Kerbstock zum Alphabet, 54.

when using the term "audience" here, one must remember to

include the artist as well). How this relationship is set in motion is

well worth exploring, even if it has received little sustained atten-

tion in the scholarly literature.

First, Kettledrummer closely approximates the "pictographs"

or "hieroglyphs" Klee introduced in previous works. Smith Pierce

has already connected Klee's Abduction Entfuhrung) to ( (1928)

the old Chinese character for "seeing" in Weule's Vom Kerbstock

zum Alphabet (fig. 31 ): "a combination of two independent sche-

mata—the eye that sees and the diagonal legs that move." 156 This

same character serves as a likely prototype, with modifications,

for Kettledrummer : the eye was retained and the legs eliminated,

replaced by arms in the process of beating a drum. If only on

these grounds, Kettledrummer fits very comfortably within the

compass of Klee's exploration of language. For all that, the picto-

graphic image remains difficult to interpret. Many individuals to

whom the author of this essay showed the work did not automati-

cally identify the figure as a drummer, although, once the title was

disclosed, they retroactively recognized the reference and even

deemed it appropriate (reinforcing Klee's avowal that a work

of art begins with the title, or, more accurately, that its meaning

is often contingent upon it). The single central eye, by virtue of

being so conspicuous, dominates the piece. The vertical shape at

the upper left, by contrast, is so abstracted and physically discon-

nected from the main figure's anatomy that it registers, at least at

first glance, as a separate form, comparable to the abstract signs

Fig. 30: Paul Klee, Kettledrummer ( Paukenspieler 1940/270. Colored ), Klee often combined with figural shapes or landscape elements. paste on paper on cardboard, 34.6 x 21.2 cm, Zentrum Paul Klee, But a comparable, though longer, form sprouts from below the Bern. dark outline of the head, compelling the spectator to interpret

it as a neck extending into a shoulder and, finally, into a down-

KETTLEPRU^yVIER; A CASE STUDY turned arm. In that context, the abstracted form at the upper left

This link is poignantly discernible in Kettledrummer Pauken- despite being detached—now reads differently: namely, as the ( spieler) of 1940 (fig. 30). O. K. Werckmeister interprets the figure's right arm, an arm extended upward. piece's overall configuration as a variation on the swastika, an Once the title guides our identification of the figure, we mar- obvious allusion to Nazi brutality, with the red areas referenc- shal our powers of projection to fashion not only a head out of a ing the blood spilled by the countless victims of this totalitarian few rudimentary strokes, but also hands from the small circles at

153 regime. Though compelling, not all scholars have accepted this the termination of the arms. What is more, we infer these hands interpretation. Franciscono prefers to see the piece as commemo- as clasping the drumsticks the artist did not condescend to depict rating Heinrich Knauer, the percussionist of the Dresden Opera because he assumed, cleverly and rightly, that the audience

154 Orchestra, a reading buttressed by an anecdote related by would conjure them in their imagination. Alternatively, we might

Will Grohmann: "I remember [Klee] saying that one evening in read the arms as extending into drumsticks themselves, with the the excitement of drawing he had the feeling that he was striking circles, not as clasping hands, but as the mallets at their tips

155 a kettledrum." This revealing admission bespeaks the artist's now a part of, rather than an appendage to, the figure's sche- thrill at having physically elicited the activity his work was depict- matic anatomy. Reinforcing this reading is Klee's 1939 drawing, ing, and establishing the very sympathetic/empathetic relation- Old Fiddler ( alter Geiger (fig. 32), in which face and violin, ship between work and audience mentioned above (although, human form and musical instrument, likewise merge into a single

157 form. At this point, it is also worth mentioning how technically

153 O. K. Werckmeister, Versuche uber Paul Klee (Frankfurt: Syndikat, 1981), 117-18, 191.

154 Franciscono, Paul Klee, 373. 156 Pierce, Klee and Primitive Art, 147.

155 Grohmann, Paul Klee, 349. 157 Klee, His Life and Work, 99. a

127

Fig. 32: Paul Klee, Old Fiddler (alter Geiger), 1939/310. Pencil on paper on cardboard, 20.9 x 29.7 cm, location unknown.

Fig. 34: William Morris Hunt ( 1 824-79), The Drummer Boy, 1 862. Oil

on canvas, 91 .8 x 66.7 cm, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Gift of Mrs. Samuel H. Wolcott, 66.1055.

movement be mitigated, if not compromised altogether—tend to

depict actions at their onset or conclusion, never in mid-stream.

Klee obviously took such advice to heart: he raised one of his

drummer's hands to simulate the beginning of the action—an

"upstroke"—and lowered the other to simulate its completion—

"downblow" (in drumming terminology). That reliable painterly

practice not only heightened the sensation of movement; it also

helped evoke the very kind of drumming Klee had in mind. We

do not envisage the drummer tapping the drum lightly, or even

producing a drum roll with both arms staying below shoulder

height—as in Honore Daumier's Street Scene (fig. 33)—but beat-

ing the drum loudly, raising his hands, alternatively, one at a time,

well above his head—not unlike the figure in, say, William Morris

FHunt's The Drummer Boy (fig. 34).

Figure and title thus contribute something different to the con-

struction of meaning: in effect, word and image are co-expres-

Fig. 33: Honore Daumier ( 1 808-79), Street Scene with a Mounteback 158 sive without being redundant. By itself, the image provides Playing a Drum, c. 1 865. Drawing in pen and watercolor over black insufficient information to denote the figure unambiguously as a chalk, 33.5 x 25.5 cm, British Museum, London, Bequeathed by Cesar Mange de Hauke, PD 1968-2-10-30. drummer; and the title insufficient information to denote the kind

of drumming performed. Image and title thus combine to form

(and experientially) difficult the suggestion of motion proves in a unit of meaning that conveys more than language and ges- a static idiom such as painting. A falling object, for instance, ture do in isolation. In this respect, Klee's piece approximates is nearly impossible to evoke on canvas as one can never be a colloquial conversation where a speaker mentions the act of sure whether the object is falling, rising, or simply levitating in mid-air. To avoid such confusion, visual artists— lest the effect of 158 McNeill, Gesture and Thought, 22. drumming, simultaneously ges- turing toward the listener with both hands in a manner similar to that portrayed in Morris

Hunt's painting. The verbal report provides one piece of information, the gesture another: this is what is meant by speech and gesture being co-expressive without being redundant, and why David

McNeill argues that gestures should be regarded as parts of language rather than super- fluous embellishments. As we filter information from verbal and visual inputs, we construct an overarching scenario wherein both are interpretively

159 consistent , a largely intuitive rather than purely intellectual exercise. At issue, then, is not valorizing one over the other as it is underscoring how they Fig. 35: Franz Kline (1910-62), Mahoning, 1956. Oil and paper collage on canvas, 203.2 x 254 cm, mutually reinforce the con- Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, Purchase with funds from the Friends of the Whitney Museum of

160 American Art, 57.10. struction of meaning .

What distinguishes the ges-

163 ture from the verbal report, however, is that the former becomes, surface of which is perceived instantaneously . Paradoxically,

161 quite literally, a material carrier of the idea . This materiality, this contradicts Klee's other statement cited earlier, about the in turn, endows the information conveyed with enhanced con- eye's "inability to see even a small surface equally sharp at all creteness, an advantage that explains why we gesture while points" and need to scan a surface "portion after portion." (But speaking—not only to help us think and add rhetorical empha- this would hardly be the first instance of an artist contradicting sis to our speech, but also to deliver our message with greater him- or herself.) For our purposes, then, the appropriate contrast specificity. The same may be said of Klee's image. Comparing to target is less that between a line and a plane as that between it to Daumier's, we infer, even on the basis of a few reductive the tracking of a line and the comprehension of language: in this strokes, a great deal about the kind of drumming performed. In case, following a trajectory versus reading a title. On this point,

Daumier, the range of motion is narrower, the speed of the drum- McNeill argues that: "When co-expressive speech and a ges- ming faster, the sound continuous, and the mood of the playing, ture synchronize, we see something that is both simultaneous and

." 164 in spite of the clown's severe facial expression, festive. (In a way, sequential This observation is highly suggestive: if we take there is a kind of asynchrony or mismatch between Daumier's Klee's title as standing for "speech," and the rapid brushwork as

162 drummer and his playing. In Klee, contrast, the range of standing for "gesture," then our reading of Kettledrummer is also ) by motion is greater, the sound discontinuous, the speed slower, the simultaneous and sequential. tones darker and heavier, and the mood somber, even ominous. While reading the title, we understand—almost instanta-

The energetic quality of Klee's representation, moreover— neously—the artist's ambition to depict drumming, and, while even when compared to Hunt's— is enhanced by the application perusing the piece, we experience—slowly and sequentially— of gestural strokes whose seemingly forceful execution introduces how the lines on the painting satisfy this purpose, and, more to a temporal, kinetic component to the spectator's experience of the point, the kind of drumming Klee hoped to convey. Indeed, the work. Klee was highly cognizant of line's potential to connote the gestural strokes vividly suggest both the heaviness and

165 a temporal dimension as we track its course, a progress inscribed directionality of the drummer's movements fulfilling the ambi- , in time, as opposed, he claimed, to our grasping of a plane, the tion Grohmann ascribed to Klee: to have the audience feel as

though they were not simply watching someone hit a drum, but

159 Ibid., 64. 1 63 Paul Klee, cited in Paul Klee, ed. Jean-Louis Prat and Antoni Tapies, exh. cat.

160 Ibid., 92ff. (St. Paul-de-Vence: Fondation Maeght, 1977), 30.

161 Ibid., 58. 164 McNeill, Gesture and Thought, 91.

162 Ibid., 128. 165 Ibid., 185. performing the activity themselves. Of course, since artists are accelerates or decelerates one's cadence, introduces dramatic h igh , y adept at "hiding the. Hack,* one should nevet assunte pauses, or raises or lowers one's voice). that traces left on canvas or paper transparently reveal the speed The import of Will Grohmann's recollection—of Klee's excite- 129 of their execution. Many artists even delighted in fooling their ment over the feeling of striking a drum while drawing—can now audience, as is attested by a charming anecdote related by be better appreciated, cementing the relevance of gesture to the American painter Philip Guston about Franz Kline, an art- Klee's artistic philosophy, and, more broadly, to language and ist whose work often falls under the rubric of "action painting," thought. In fact, this anecdote also echoes recent debates as to and whose mode of execution looks, and should theoretically be, whether gestures are enacted for the benefit of the speaker, so even more spontaneous and improvisational than Klee's (fig. 35). that ideas are formulated properly and the right words used, or

After watching him work, however, Guston recalled how Kline for the benefit of the audience, so that particular points are suc- would spend "days or weeks reworking the edge of a stroke to cessfully conveyed. The evidence, as is almost always the case 166 give the impression that it was painted with intensity and elan." in such debates, points in both directions. Congenitally blind indi-

Kline himself admitted: "Some of the pictures I work on a long viduals gesture while they speak, even to each other, suggesting

170 time and they look as if I've knocked them out.... Immediacy can that gestures enhance the speaker's expression; but deaf chil- be accomplished in a picture that's been worked on for a long dren, even those ignorant of sign language, spontaneously invent

167 time just as well as if it's done rapidly." It is critical, therefore, signs to petition adults, suggesting that gestures are communi-

171 not to confuse a painting with its effect, and to remember that art- cative. If Grohmann's recollection is accurate, Kettledrummer ists wield a variety of devices to beguile the spectator into mak- also suggests that painter and audience mutually benefit from a

172 ing certain assumptions about process, assumptions that do not gesture's enactment. Klee sought to contrive a specific impres- necessarily correspond to the way a painting was actually made. sion for his audience, and obviously experienced great personal

In fact, Klee frequently reworked his own compositions, just as delight in having pulled it off. he did his diaries, revealing how carefully he crafted both the One may also interject that, in everyday situations, gestures images he painted and the image he constructed for his public. vary from insignificant gesticulations that accompany speech all

How Kettledrummer was executed, therefore, is less relevant the way to conventional signs ("thumbs up" or signaling "OK"),

173 for our purposes than the impression Klee sought to manufacture: pantomime, and formal sign language. Each betrays different namely, that the piece was completed swiftly and energetically. characteristics, fulfills different functions, and engenders differ-

(For any work of art to "be successful," he professed, "it is neces- ent meanings. Insofar as Kettledrummer is concerned, the image sary never to work towards a conception of the picture completely arguably lies somewhere in the middle of this complex continuum,

168 thought out in advance." The more we accept his strokes as depicting neither meaningless gesticulation nor a purely conven- ) rapid, the more effective the evocation of drumming. To this end, tionalized sign for drumming. (In sign language, incidentally,

Klee's training as a musician proved a considerable advantage. the gesture for drumming is closer to Daumier's painting than to

Though they appear continuous and fluid, most bodily move- Klee's or Hunt's). By moving to the middle of this spectrum, Klee ments follow certain sequences: preparations, holding patterns, opens the possibility that the broader meaning of his image is not

169 strokes, post-stroke holds, and retractions —sequences that simply gestural or iconic, but metaphorical. In metaphor, after all, apply all the more to the playing of musical instruments. Perusing literal situations are employed to convey non-literal ones: e.g.,

Kettledrummer with these ideas in mind, especially given that it the "drum beat" of life, of a nation, or even of people's hearts. respects the aesthetic rule of depicting an action at its inception At the conclusion of Walden, to cite a famous example, Henry or at its close, one gets a visceral sense of repetitive rhythm, in David Thoreau writes: "If a man does not keep pace with his all likelihood because one also infers the preparations, holds, companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. strokes, post-holds, and retractions of each upstroke and down- Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or

174 blow. And if such sequential phases pertain to the playing of faraway." musical instruments, they also pertain, though perhaps to a lesser In this case, drumming is not meant literally, but figuratively, degree, to the physical activity of painting and writing. As artists not to describe a physical activity, but to connote an abstract prepare to apply paint to canvas, they might visualize their intent principle. For the metaphor to work, however, the connection in their minds, rehearse the stroke in the air before making physi- between the abstract principle (an individual's lifestyle) and cal contact with the canvas, and may even repeat the stroke in the literal situation connoting it (the beating of a drum) cannot the air after completion, all before contemplating whether the be entirely arbitrary: the analogy must somehow strike us as effect created is the appropriate one. The same applies to the appropriate. Yet that relationship still stands as culture-specific physical act of writing and even speaking (especially as one

170 Jana Iverson and Susan Goldin-Meadow, "What's Communication Got To

166 Harry Gaugh, "Franz Kline: The Man and the Myth," ARTnews 84 (Dec. Do with it? Gesture in Congenitally Blind Children," Developmental Psychol- 1985): 62. ogy 33, no. 3 (1997): 453-67

167 Franz Kline cited in Clifford Ross, ed., Abstract Expressionism: Creators and 171 McNeill, Gesture and Thought, 45-47.

Critics (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990), 101. 172 Ibid., 53ff.

168 Klee, Diaries, #857. 173 Ibid., 5-7.

1 169 McNeill, Gesture and Thought, 31 -32. 174 Henry David Thoreau, Walden ( 854; London: W. J. Gage, 1888), 323. 130

Fig. 37: Hans Holbein (c. 1497-1543), The Bride and Bridegroom

( Die Verliebten ), in The Dance of Death, c. 1524-26. Woodcut, 6.5 x 4.8 cm, Kunstmuseum Basel.

Fig. 36: Hitler Youth Poster, 1935. Library of Congress, Washington, (fig. 37) has also been proposed as a prototype for Klee's piece, DC. and with good reason, as a drummer has long been judged an

appropriate metaphor for the ever-present threat of mortality.

(because the members of some cultures may, and others may not, Death is relentless; its beat unremitting, the rhythm of which we

175 recognize that association as suitable). It is for this reason that may ignore but ultimately cannot escape. We think that we step

Werckmeister's interpretation of Kettledrummer remains compel- to the music we chose, but with all due respect to Thoreau, it is

ling—especially in view of the Nazi threat overtaking Europe, and death that plays the tune. Note that the Hitler Youth poster and

of Klee himself having suffered from it personally, being forced the Holbein both have the drummer's hands raised above his

to relinquish his teaching post in Germany. In fact, Klee often head— like's Klee's image—implying that the beat is slow, heavy,

176 made satirical references to the Nazis in his work, and many and repetitive, and the call an especially urgent one, a condition

propaganda images of Hitler Youth beating drums (fig. 36) were that applies equally to Hunt's painting, since its purpose was to

disseminated during the Nazi period, apparently to galvanize incite young men to volunteer for the Union army during the Civil

the population into feeling loyalty for a regime whose author- War.

ity hinged on being intimately associated with the fatherland. No single interpretive scheme, of course, will exhaust the

Klee could thus be turning a propagandistic image into its sinister meanings of Kettledrummer, to say nothing of Klee's visual and

opposite, showing the dark ferocity behind the sanitized pictures intellectual engagement with the linguistic as a whole. But com-

of health and enthusiasm the Nazis labored to publicize. Even paring the image to other depictions of drumming, as well as

so, this connection does not preclude Klee's painting from signi- analyzing it in light of the way gesture and verbal language com-

fying a range of meanings. From the politically and personally plement each other, allows different facets of this painting, and

specific to the abstract and philosophical, the image could sig- of Klee's aesthetics in general, to emerge in sharper focus. As a

nify the Nazi takeover, the tragedy of fate, or the imminence of result, one may propose that any investigation of Klee's relation-

death (that of the percussionist of the Dresden Opera Orchestra, ship to language benefits from broadening its definition of the

or even the artist's own). Holbein's The Bride and Bridegroom linguistic to include gesture and movement. The more elastic our

definition, the more of Klee's diverse sources and ideas may be

175 See McNeill, Gesture and Thought, 48ff. included in the conversation, and the more complete our analy- 176 Alexander Zschokke, "Begegnung mit Paul Klee," Die Schweizerische ses of the numerous questions raised by his engagement with Monatszeitscrift (Oct. 1948): 74-76; cited in O. K. Werckmeister, "From

Revolution to Exile," in Lanchner, Paul Klee, 39-63. the linguistic. Advantageously, art historical investigations would 183 also align with current views in communication theory: that, if ges- many artists at the time took them to heart. In 1922, when ture did not actually precede vocalization, it at least functioned Hans Prinzhorn, a psychiatrist trained in both art history and phi- as its important auxiliary from the very first time human beings losophy, published a study on the art of the mentally ill, he read- started to communicate. ily connected his subject with the art of children and non-Western

cultures. The book was also circulated at the Bauhaus after its

publication, and Klee's keen interest in its illustrations has been KLEE, CHILDHOOD, AND THE BIRTH OF widely documented. 184

LANGUAGE It would therefore be exceedingly naive to assume that Klee

If Klee appropriated pictographic forms in his work, as well as simply resurrected the birth of communication, or that he was the idea that certain alphabets reversed the orientation of select himself endowed with the childlike innocence some of his early letters, he also intuited that topographical shapes inspired the supporters and detractors imputed to him. The artist's state- configuration of writing, and the extent to which motion and ges- ments cited throughout this essay evince the extent of his acute ture contribute to communication. He then amalgamated these self-awareness in many matters artistic. He may not have been disparate ideas and elements to evoke, in his own words, the as knowledgeable about language- and image-processing as

1 "primitive beginnings of art." His concern was with the origins present-day neuroscientists and cognitions, but, if his Bauhaus of things: of art, of communication, of language. "The spirit [is] at Notebooks betray anything, it is how deliberate and thoughtful he

178 its purest," he declared, "in the beginning." "Primitive feelings was about his metier. His teaching diagrams reveal an inordinate

179 are the strongest." sensitivity to the subtle differences and nuances that ensue from

These interests also intersect with his admiration for children's the slightest alteration of line, shape, tone, or color. Even if his art, a topic that deservedly received much attention in the art appreciation for outsider art was genuine and deeply felt, it was historical literature. Klee included select childhood drawings in no less of a strategic move. On its basis, he could allege a dis- his oeuvre catalogue, and felt considerable pride upon their tance from anything programmatic, and persuade his audience

180 rediscovery. But it is equally worth stating that this interest is that his art remained untainted by the calculating, selfish motives clearly time-bound and culture-specific, reflecting ideas voiced of adults, a recurrent leitmotif in the writings of expressionist art-

185 by numerous artists and thinkers throughout the early twentieth ists. (As related above, Klee described himself as a "childish

186 century. Disillusioned with what they saw as the depersonaliza- man," just as Egon Schiele opened an autobiographical poem

187 tion of an increasingly materialistic culture, and with the rejec- with the line: "I, eternal child." Highly calculated, the claim ) tion of both the imagination and the supernatural in positivistic of innocence knowingly resurrected an old ethical debate as to philosophy, numerous painters, from Gauguin onward, sought to whether a genuinely good person acts morally by instinct or by regain a naive, innocent perception of the world, one ostensibly intellectual deliberation. While one tradition argued in favor of uncorrupted by what they denounced as the decadent, over- rational choice (how could ethical behavior be the result of mere refinement of modern Western culture. In the discourse surround- accident?), others argued the reverse: that an ethical person acts ing modernism, terms previously intended for censure— "simple," naturally and instinctively (if performed reluctantly, contrary to

"awkward," and "childish"— now morphed into terms of appro- the agent's natural inclinations, how could an action, no matter bation. 181 Curiously enough, the possibility that a childlike vision could be literally accessed was commonly endorsed at the turn

own experience into primaeval experience" (ibid., 371 ). of the twentieth century, primarily on account of the widely dis- 183 Oskar Kokoschka, for one, was clearly exposed to the idea that ontogeny postulate that recapitulates the seminated ontogeny phylogeny: recapitulates phylogeny from his teachers at the Kunstgewerbeschule in idea that individuals recapitulate the evolution of the species as a Vienna, who, as Carl Schorske has already remarked, were greatly appre- ciative of children's drawings, an art form which, in their view, "recapitulates whole. 182 Though very few would countenance such ideas today, atavistically the childhood of peoples and the childhood of art" (Deutsche

Kunst und Dekoration 22 [1908-09]: 53, quoted in Carl Schorske, Fin-de- 177 Klee, Diaries, #905. Siecie Vienna: Politics and Culture [New York: Knopff, 1985], 328). Vari-

178 Ibid., #944. ants of the theory even appear in contemporary criticism: in a review of

179 Ibid., #323. 1 908, Alfred Wechsler wrote that, on account of his youth, Kokoschka "is at

1 80 Letter to Lily Stumpf, Oct. 3, 1 902, in Klee, Briefe, 1 :273. See also Haxthau- the place where the first artists began, seven, eight or more centuries ago"

sen, Paul Klee, 174ff. (W. Fred [Alfred Wechsler], "Kunstschau 1908," Osterreicher Rundschau

181 Roskill, Klee, Kandinsky, 1. 15 [Apr.- June 1908]: 452). For a fuller discussion of Wechsler, see Elana

182 Hoping to justify the psychological relevance of ancient myths—say, that of Shapira, "The Interpretation of Children's Drawings and the Reception of

Oedipus or Narcissus—even Freud referenced this concept, confident in its Kokoschka's Work at the Kunstschau 1908," in Oskar Kokoschka—aktuelle

absolute scientific validity. Passed on from generation to generation, this Perspektiven, ed. Patrick Werkner (Vienna: Hochschule fur angewandte

legacy was said to contain the inescapable aspects of, and exegetical keys Kunst in Wien, 1998), 21.

to, our very own psychological make-up. "The prehistory into which the 184 See Roskill, Klee, Kandinsky, 142, and Klee, His Life and Work, 180-85.

dream-work leads us back," Freud writes, "is. ..the individual's prehistory, his 185 In 1912, for instance, Egon Schiele declared that "One needs to observe

childhood, and on the other, in so far as each individual somehow recapitu- and experience the world with naive, pure eyes in order to attain a great

lates in an abbreviated form the entire development of the human race, into Weltanschauung" (Egon Schiele: Letters and Poems 1910-1912 from the phylogenetic prehistory too. ..symbolic connections, which the individual Leopold Collection [Munich: Prestel, 2008], 127).

has never acquired by learning, may justly claim to be regarded as a phylo- 186 Klee, Diaries, #431. For the contemporary interest in the child, see also

genetic heritage" (Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis Franciscono, Paul Klee, 92ff.

[New York: Norton, 1966], 199). Even our primordial fantasies, he adds, 187 See Egon Schiele, /, Eternal Child: Paintings and Poems, trans. Anselm

"are a phylogenetic endowment. In them the individual reaches beyond his Hollo (New York: Grove Press, 1988), 6. how salutary, be called moral?). children were viewed in early twentieth-century culture. While

Klee clearly positioned himself in the latter camp, hoping the he professed (in his often quoted review of 1912) that "ethno- moral attributes associated with naivete and innocence would be graphic museums," "the nursery," and "drawings of the insane"

195 readily ascribed to artists, like himself, whose work and personal- revealed the "primordial origins of art," by 1930, Klee told ities allegedly betrayed those very same attributes. But since this Hans-Friedrich Geist: "Don't relate my works to those of chil- 196 ethical debate was never unanimously resolved, the sword cut dren. They are worlds apart." This radical about-face might both ways and modern artists were as often criticized as praised be attributable to Klee's working under such remarkably diverse

188 for appropriating formal elements of children's art. Rudolf cultures and political regimes as the German Empire, the Weimar

197 Arnheim, for one, decried Klee on account of populating his works Republic, and the rise of the Nazis to power. with "child-like figures," satisfying "a bourgeoisie" that recovers Even more decisive, perhaps, was Klee's belief, as Otto from the terrors of the Great War with "sofa dolls and assorted Werckmeister suspects, that child-like spontaneity was incompat-

189 grotesque knickknacks." It was not just the accusations of cru- ible with the expertise required of someone teaching at a state- 198 dity, incompetence, and lack of training that were directed at funded institution like the Bauhaus. Smarting from the stings modernist artists. The very moral arguments they wielded boom- of critics—that he was "only a very funny and amusing copier of

199 eranged against them with equal force. For some, childhood children's drawings" —as much as to excessive praise for the represented a state of innocence before the corrupting influence same reasons, Klee had numerous reasons to dispel that convic- of civilization, for others, the very corrupt condition from which tion. Not surprisingly, even his admirers began to distance his civilization was at pains to emerge. "Virtually all vices fester in paintings from the creations of children. As early as 1918, for the mind of the child," Paul Adam declared, "...evil in adults is a example, Theodor Daubler exclaimed that "nothing remains here sign of their not having grown up. In the taverns, in the places of of a childish effort! On the contrary: the most insignificant coin- debauchery, in the prisons, it is the mental tone of the child which cidences are ruled out: everything that Klee produces must be 190 200 animates and motivates." For their part, Cesare Lombroso and called totally masterly, masculine art."

William Ferrero exclaimed: "What terrific criminals would chil- Daubler is perfectly right, of course (though his use of the dren be if they had strong passions, muscular strength, and suf- term "masculine" is oddly misplaced), if only because no trained

91 ficient intelligence. And in his "Three Essays," Freud argued eye would mistake Klee's production with anything childish. The that children have a special proclivity toward cruelty because aesthetic possibilities afforded to children are, needless to say,

192 feelings of pity and empathy develop only later in life. At the undeniably limited. Having no training in physical anatomy or turn of the twentieth century, therefore, the image of child bifur- linear perspective, academic realism or foreshortening are sim- cates: a state of fragility and innocence, or one of criminality and ply unavailable to them as workable options. This is not to make perversion—a state of grace before the fall, or one of bestiality a qualitative or value judgment, only to identity the specific con-

193 and instinct before civilization. Klee might have been affected straints under which any artist—child or adult— may be operat- no less by unrealistically negative than by unrealistically posi- ing at a given time or place. As is attested by the exceptional tive accounts of children, and may thus have formulated a more

195 Paul Klee, Die Alpen 5 (Jan. 1912): 302, reprinted in Schriften: Rezensionen nuanced view. Describing one of his own images—The Child with und Aufsatze, ed. Christian Geelhaar (Cologne: DuMont, 1976), 97. a Pear— he wrote to his wife: "It has character, if also a malevolent 196 Hans-Friedrich Geist, "Paul Klee und die Welt des Kindes," Werk 37 one. The greed, the teeth, the animalistic traits should be brought (1950): 190-91.

194 1 97 See Werckmeister's fascinating essay, "The Issue of Childhood in the Art of out, without neglecting the childlike grace."

Paul Klee," Arts Magazine 52, no. 1 (Sept. 1977): 138-51. Klee's statements thus reveal the with which ambivalence 198 To be sure, Johannes Itten, who spearheaded the effort to get Klee appointed there, was equally fascinated with childhood: "That our play become work and our work become celebration and our celebration become play—

188 See O. K. Werckmeister, The Making of Paul Klee's Career, 1914- 1920 this seems to me to be the highest accomplishment of human activity. To (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 116-17,235. shape the play of forces inside us—outside us—into a festive action by way

189 Rudolf Arnheim, "Klee Fur Kinder," Die Weltbuhne 26 (1930): 170-73. of self-oblivious work—this means to create in the children's way." See Willy

190 Paul Adam, "Des enfants," La revue blanche 9 (1895): 350-53. Rotzler, Johannes Itten: Werke und Schriften (Zurich: Orell Fussli, 1972), 191 Cesare Lombroso and William Ferrero, The Female Offender (London: 69. And Oscar Schlemmer, another of Klee's Bauhaus faculty colleagues,

Appleton, 1912), 151. who had originally tried, unsuccessfully, to get Klee hired at Stuttgart,

192 Sigmund Freud, "Three Essays on the History of Sexuality" (1905), in The wrote the following about him in a diary entry of 1916: "With a minimum

Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, of line he can reveal all his wisdom. This is how a Buddha draws. Quietly,

vol. 7 (London: Hogarth Press, 1975), 192-93. at rest with himself.. .the most unmonumental line, because it is searching

193 On the negative image of youth in turn-of-the-century Vienna, see also Ste- and childlike, in order to reveal greatness.... The acts of all important men

fan Zweig's The World of Yesterday (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, are rooted in a simple, but all-comprehensive experience." See Oskar Sch-

1964), 33: "The world about and above us, which directed all its thoughts lemmer, Briefe und Tagebucher, ed. Tut Schlemmer (Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz,

only to the fetish of security, did not like youth; or rather it constantly mis- 1977), 24; also cited in Werkmeister, The Making of Paul Klee's Career,

trusted it. Proud of its systematic 'progress' and of its order, bourgeois soci- 214. All the same, Itten left the Bauhaus, and the institution's growing practi-

ety proclaimed moderation and leisure in all forms of life as the only virtues cal and functional ethos was growing increasingly at odds with Klee's own

of man; all hasty efforts to advance ourselves were to be avoided. ..young approach to creativity. See, for example, Marcel Franciscono, "Paul Klee

people, who always instinctively desire rapid and radical changes, were in the Bauhaus: The Artist as Lawgiver," Arts Magazine 52, no. 1 (Sept. therefore considered a doubtful element which was to be held down or kept 1977): 122-27.

inactive for as long as possible.... This distrust that every young man was 1 99 Lisbeth Stern, "Bildende Kunst: Klee," Sozialistische Monatshefte 23 (1917):

'not quite reliable' was felt at that time in all circles." 708.

194 Letter to Lily Stumpf, Nov. 5, 1905, cited in Haxthausen, Paul Klee, 196. 200 Theodor Daubler, "Paul Klee," Das Kunstblaft 2 (1918): 24-27. ) —

diversity of his work, Klee, conversely, entertained and exercised tha Richardson for her help in securing loans, Adeane Bregman,

numerous alternatives within a remarkably broad choice situa- Librarian at Boston College, for her invaluable contribution to my

tion. even admitted as much himself: if modern works "pro- research and Ursula Cernuschi and Suzy Forster for their continual He , 133

duce a primitive impression," he confessed, "this 'primitiveness' affection and support. Lastly, I dedicate this essay to the memory of

is explained by discipline, which consists in reducing everything my granduncle, Heniek Storozum, a wizard on the chessboard and

to a few steps. It is no more than economy.... Which is to say, the an exceptional human being.

opposite of real primitiveness." 201

Any distance Klee introduces between his work and the

genuinely "primitive" is commendable, disclosing, as it does,

his critical consciousness about himself and his work. Still, Klee walked as fine and delicate a line as his own Tightrope Walker

Seiltanzer plate 20). Though he rejected childishness, ( (1923;

he never completely disavowed its "look," just as he occasionally

rejected language without disavowing its look. This strategic posi-

tion, in turn, allowed him to investigate how our perceptual and

cognitive abilities navigate the unexpected juxtaposition of visual

and conceptual elements. He loved, in his own words, "to rec- 202 oncile. ..opposites," combining art and language, representa-

tion and abstraction, calculation and spontaneity, innocence and

sophistication. But a particular predilection was to cull writings

and scripts, pictographs or hieroglyphs, children's drawings and

scribblings, to engender formal relationships, spatial qualities, or

hybrid amalgamations that, because of their ensuing ambiguities,

were gradually expelled from high art and writing systems over

time. This was not regression for its own sake. By reintroducing

these ambiguities, Klee could reignite the very cognitive discom-

forts that prompted their extinction in the first place, unravel their

logic, and reproduce them at will. If our visual and mental powers

train us to discriminate, Klee sought to conflate: the topographic

and the linguistic, the verbal and the visual, left and right ori-

entations, the phonic and the lexical, the static and the kinetic

and then orchestrate these elements in such ways as to induce

doubt and uncertainty. With some latitude, we may propose that,

from an aesthetic vantage point, Klee was conducting his own

investigations into the process of human communication. Just as

scientific knowledge advances when brain functioning misfires,

perhaps Klee learned more by frustrating than facilitating the

operations of language. It was not just a question of devising

ambiguous visual solutions for their own sake as determining why

they provoke ambiguity, and where, along a sliding scale from

most to least ambiguous, particular visual solutions fall. Though

the mismatches orchestrated easily align with the modernist proj-

ect of undermining traditional means of rendering space, and

have been so described in the art historical literature, looking at

Klee's engagement with the linguistic from the lens of recent cog-

nitive psychology and neuroscience reveals a far more subtle, complex, and sophisticated agenda.

I would like to thank John Sallis and Nancy Netzer for their invita-

tion to contribute to this catalogue, and my colleagues Jeffery Howe

and Michael Mulhern for their generous help and assistance. I also

kindly acknowledge Kate Shugert for her editorial comments, Mar-

201 Klee, Diaries, #857.

202 Ibid., #389.

Eliane Escoubas A Polyphonic Painting: Paul Klee and Rhythm

In an article from 1912, Klee situates himself in the context of expressionism as opposed to impressionism:

Both invoke a decisive moment in the genesis of the work: for impressionism this is the

instant in which the impression of nature is received, whereas for expressionism, it is the

subsequent instant, that in which the received impression is rendered. Impressionism stops

with the observation of form, rather than rising to its active construction.

And he adds a few lines later:

1 One particular branch of expressionism is represented by cubism.

Thus for Klee, a painting will not depict states of feeling, but rather will be an active construction. But what

does this notion of "construction" imply? It essentially adds a sense of temporal unfolding that the impres-

sionist painting lacks, as the famous "Schopferische Konfession" of 1918 makes clear:

Is a painting ever born in a single moment? Certainly not! It is built up little by little, no

differently than a house. And does the spectator make a tour of the work in an instant?

(Often yes, alas...) On the side of the spectator also, the principal activity is temporal....

The artwork is movement, it is itself a fixed movement, and is perceived in movement (the

eye-muscles). 2

If time is a fundamental principle of the pictorial work, then its proximity to the musical work is evident. And

Klee specifies:

The musical work has the advantage of being perceived in the exact order of succes-

sion in which it had been conceived, whereas the plastic work presents the uninformed

with the difficulty of not knowing where to begin. To the informed spectator, however, it

presents the advantage of being able to vary the order of its reading and thus to become

3 aware of its multiple meanings.

1 Paul Klee, "Die Ausstellung des Modernen Bundes im Kunsthaus Zurich," Die Alpen 6 (Aug. 1912), reprinted in Schriften:

Rezensionen und Aufsatze, ed. Christian Geelhaar (Cologne: DuMont, 1976), 106- 107. I would like to note that Klee was one of

Heidegger's favorite painters—see the "conversations" with Heinrich Wiegand Petzet in Auf einen Stern zugehen: Begegnungen

mit Martin Heidegger 1929 bis 1976 (Frankfurt: Societats, 1983); also see Otto Poggeler's reports of these conversations in

Heidegger in seiner Zeit (Munich: Fink, 1999).

2 Klee, "Beitrag fur den Sammelband 'Schopferische Konfession,"' in Schriften, 120.

3 Ibid., 120-21. 135 ,

The pictorial work is thus not an object but an event. It does ment), and presenting itself globally as a continuity (the ensemble

not have the fixity of an object; and to look at it is to allow oneself structure-periodicity-movement)." He then calls rhythm "any per- 136 to be taken along varied and often unknown paths, that are "set ceived phenomenon to which one can attribute at least two of 9 up" in the work. This is why Klee declares: "The singular optical these three criteria."

4 path no longer responds to today's needs."

There would be, then, a difference between the optical eye

and the pictorial eye. If the optical eye is insufficient, then what CONSTRUCTION: TECTONIC FORMS

kind of eye is at issue in painting? Is it the haptic eye, a vision- AND ENERGETIC FORMS

touching, as Riegl defines it in Questions of Style? Not this either. To construct, for Klee, is to produce a structure. For our part,

Let us, for the moment, designate it as the "musical eye." We will we shall speak of "tectonic" and "energetic" forms. In a painting,

encounter this again and again in the course of our analyses. we shall suggest, two sorts of forms are articulated, juxtaposed,

5 This is why Klee speaks of a "plastic polyphony," in mixed or opposed. The tectonic forms are lines of construction

"Schopferische Konfession," describing it as follows: "The sep- (folds, breaks, frames, dislocations, interlacings, stratifications,

aration of the elements of form, and their arrangement in sub- etc.); the others, the energetic forms, are lines of force (weights,

divisions; the dislocation of this order and the reconstruction attractions, contractions, elevations, shocks, stops, and suspen-

of a totality on all sides simultaneously; plastic polyphony, the sions). And these forms are not figurative forms: they are not nec-

achievement of repose through the equilibrium of movement, so essarily the outlines that delimit figures or that streak across their

many questions decisive for the science of forms, but not yet art in surfaces. They are not necessarily objectival lines, but lines along

the supreme sense," adding that "polyphonic painting is superior which the gaze is led— lines that thereby "construct" the gaze.

to music in the sense that the temporal element is present in it as What then is to be understood by "construction," and by

6 a spatial given." "structure"?

If, as he writes in 1928, "to draw and to paint is to learn to Klee's first works are drawings and engravings: from 1901 to

see behind a facade, to grasp something underlying, to recog- 1905, he creates a cycle of eleven etchings entitled Inventions,

7 nize the underlying forces, to unveil," then we shall hypothesize which are a sort of deconstruction of natural structures. These

that it is "rhythm," as movement and time, as subjacent force, that are the famous caricatures, deformed figures—almost monstrously

is to be unveiled and produced. Rhythm would be this arch-sensi- so—the "de-figured," so to speak, such as the Two Men Meet

bility, this implication of time and of movement, whose fundamen- Each Supposing the Other to Be of Higher Rank ( Zwei Manner,

tal determination we find in Henri Maldiney's analyses in "The einander in hoherer Stellung vermutend, begegnen sich ), Winged

Aesthetics of Rhythm": "Art is the truth of the sensible because Hero ( Held m. Flugel ), or Aged Phoenix ( Greiser Phonix ). Here

rhythm is the truth of aisthesis." we find dislocation and deformation at the same time as construc-

In order to define rhythm, Maldiney appeals to the analyses tion. A construction that de-forms, a de-formation that constructs.

of the Greek ruth mos as Benveniste elaborates it: For Klee, the issue is one of abandoning the re-production of the

object. And what is more evident in caricature than the aban-

The Greek ruth mos does mean form in the donment of this reproduction? Grimacing figures, disproportions,

sense of schema, but a particular kind of form contortions, different kinds of anamorphosis, or as he writes: "the

that is different from the schema. Whereas the exaggeration of the ugly parts of the model." Seemingly arbi-

schema is fixed, realized form, posited as an trary deformations of natural reality; in his journal he mentions

object, ruthmos designates form in the instant Bocklin and Goya as his inspirations.

in which it is taken up by that which is moving, This is also why Klee recognizes his proximity to cubism, which,

fluid. It is improvised, momentary, modifiable according to him, is (as we have seen) "a branch of expression-

8 form. ism." However, that in cubism to which he is attached, that which

will become important later, is what he will call "numerical deter-

In addition to Maldiney's analyses, we shall also refer to mination":

Pierre Sauvanet's studies in his two-volume work Le rythme et

la raison. There, the author elaborates three criteria of analy- The cubists for their part push numerical de-

sis which he presents as "combinatorial criteria": structure (or termination to the smallest details.... Cubist re-

schema periodicity periodos and movement [metabole): "The flection rests essentially on the reduction of all ), ( ),

rhythmical, in the strong sense, is both discontinuous and regular proportion and culminates in primordial forms,

10 (periodicity), while allowing for a margin of irregularity (move- like the triangle, rectangle, and the circle.

4 Klee, "Wege des Naturstudiums," in Schriften, 124-25. 9 Pierre Sauvanet, Le rythme et la raison I: Rythmologiques (Paris: Kime,

5 Paul Klee, Ober die moderne Kunst (Bern: Benteli, 1945), 17. 2000), 148, 195. 6 Klee, "Schopferische Konfession," 122. 10 Klee, "Die Ausstellung des Modernen Bundes," 106-107. The term

7 Klee, "exacte versuche im bereich der kunst," in Schriften, 130. "reduction" has a particular meaning for Klee: it does not refer to the

8 Henri Maldiney, Regard, parole, espace (Lausanne: Editions L'Ag simple diminution of proportions but precisely to a "construction." Later,

d'homme, 1973), 1 5 6ff. Klee's affinity with Picasso and Braque will become more evident, as will —

Of course, with the etchings entitled Inventions, Klee has not This will be an "orchestra of forms" for the eye. In this space, "The

16 yet arrived at the "primordial forms" of the cubists—but he will dis- eye must graze the surface, absorb it piece by piece." Thus, the cover them. And the statement so often repeated since that time, horizontal and the vertical are set in place: 137 "art does not reproduce the visible, it renders visible," could, on a first reading (although this is not the only one possible), refer The vertical is the right path, the upright posi- back to these deformations, these numerical determinations, tion or the balance of the animal. The horizon- reductions, and distortions. tal designates its extent, its horizon. Each one

17 No doubt, the superb series of drawings of angels from is an entirely terrestrial affair, static.

1939, from the end of Klee's life, can also be classified under this genre of "deformation." Furthermore, the upright human position is represented by the

Yet these caricatures, like the later Angels, are not static, de- plumb line—oriented toward the center of the earth, for weight is formed forms, but rather what Klee calls dynamical forms. They the fundamental law of the terrestrial: everything falls. In order are what Klee, in his Bauhaus lectures, calls "structural rhythms": to avoid falling, there is only movement: an upright person will

"the most primitive structural rhythms based on repetition of one advance a foot, offset a leg in order not to stumble, not to lose

18 sole unity in the sense of left-right or up-down." This is a remark- balance. Walking is the only way of not losing balance: it is a able formulation insofar as it concerns precisely the notion of balancing that is constantly wavering and being re-established. structure as "dividual assemblage," which is to say as divisible A slight nudge to the plumb line and it begins to oscillate like

19 assemblage—which is precisely the situation with numerical ele- a pendulum. ments. 11 Whence a fundamental law for Klee (as well as for cubism):

But what are we to understand by "structural rhythms"? We balance is not symmetry. Nor is it only alternation: the tightrope must go back to the Bauhaus course and "On Modern Art," walker with his balancing rod is an example of the constant con- which concentrates the advances the course makes. quest of equilibrium. These are what Klee calls "non-symmetrical

We can reconstitute the unfolding of structure in pictorial balances" made of dissemblance and difference.

12 terms. Klee writes: "I begin logically from chaos." It is necessary to insist on this: the fundamental notion of bal-

Now, chaos is represented by the point, the point without ance or equilibrium that is not symmetry. This is what underlies breadth (geometrically defined as the intersection of two lines). not only the critique of perspectival painting (geometrical per-

If I place the tip of my pencil on the point then it becomes a spective founded on symmetry), but it is also what becomes the line: "From the dead point, the initiation of the first act of mobility central notion of modern painting. Again: the fundamental law of

13 (line)." The exit from chaos is by definition a "movement." If I modern painting is expressed thus: balance is not symmetry—this

prolong the line and produce other lines, I have a surface. Point, law, as we shall see, will be crucial to the understanding of the line, surface: "the specific elements of graphical art are points notion of rhythm.

14 and energies, linear, planiform and spatial." Turning now to what Klee calls the "dimensions" of the paint-

Are we re-discovering, here, a Cartesian space, defined by ing, we arrive at the basis for the entire theory of pictorial "con-

"figure and movement"? Perhaps, and yet Klee's lines and sur- struction" and of its overcoming in pictorial "composition," as faces have a number of very different aspects. Thus, in a sort explained in "On Modern Art." The "dimensions" of the painting of dream narrated a little after having described these "acts of are line, tonality of chiaroscuro, and color. As Klee explains: mobility," he writes:

The most limited of the givens is the line

The most diverse lines. Stains, blurred strokes, solely a matter of measure.... The tonalities

smooth, striated, blurred surfaces. Undulating or the values of chiaroscuro and the numer-

movement. Inhibited movement. Articulated, ous gradations between white and black are

counter movement. Braiding, weaving, ma- a question of weight.... The colors offer other

sonry. Imbrication. Solo. Multiple voices. Dis- characteristics, for neither rule nor balance al-

appearing lines in the process of being reacti- low for complete mastery. I would call colors

15 vated (dynamism). qualities.... These three guiding ideas are like

their friendship.

11 Paul Klee, "Bauhaus Vorlesungen 4" [Jan. 16, 1922], in Bauhaus Vor/esungen (Weimar 1921 -1922) [facsimile reproduction] (Strasbourg: 16 Paul Klee, "Padagogische Skizze: Productive und rezeptive Bewegung,"

Musees de Strasbourg; Paris: Editions Hazan, 2004), 42. The "dividual" in Form- und Gestaltungslehre 1: Das bildnerische Denken, ed. Jurg Spiller

(divisible) assemblage is opposed to the individual assemblage, which is (Basel: Schwabe, 1956), 357. Also, Klee, "Bauhaus Vorlesungen 7" [Feb.

to say to the indivisible, such as an organism. Following references to the 27, 1922], 98-99.

Bauhaus courses are from this facsimile, noting lecture number and date. 17 Klee, "Padagogische Skizze," in Das bildnerische Denken 147; "Bauhaus 12 Paul Klee, Tageb ucher 1898-1918 (Textkritische Neuedition), ed. Vorlesungen 2" [Nov. 28, 1921], 24-25.

Wolfgang Kersten (Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz, 1988), #633. 18 Klee, "Padagogische Skizze, Ubungen," in Das bildnerische Denken, 433 13 Klee, "Schopferische Konfession," 118. and "Bauhaus Vorlesungen 2" [Nov. 28, 1921], 26. See Tightrope Walker

14 Ibid. ( Seiltanzer plate ) (1923; 20). 15 Ibid., 119. 19 Klee, "Bauhaus Vorlesungen 3" [Dec. 12, 1921], 35. .

20 three domains encapsulated in each other. eye and the optical eye? Is this not what Klee is declaring in the

famous phrase "art does not reproduce the visible but makes vis-

Therefore, line, tonality (chiaroscuro), and color are measure, ible"? Is this not what Merleau-Ponty will call "the concentration 138 24 weight, and quality. No doubt this is why after the first carica- and advent to itself of the visible"?

tures and deformations or distortions in the drawings and engrav- As is well known, toward 1911 -12 Klee came into contact

ings, Klee gives himself over to tonalities around 1907-08: "I with the Blaue Reiter group; thus with Kandinsky, Kubin, Franz

21 construct landscapes in black and white, painted on glass." Marc, and Macke among others he collaborated on the second

The tonalities—black-white, lightening-darkening—are dynamical issue of the group's journal. 25

forms. It is above all with color that Klee will paint appearing, but

For Klee, pictorial space is not an extension related to mea- never without construction. It is on the occasion of a trip to Tunisia

sure, it is an energy. It is a space of stretchings, slidings, strad- in April 1914, with two friends from the Blaue Reiter (Moilliet and

dlings: not a state but a process. Tonalities too are an energy Macke), that Klee has a revelation concerning color. He writes,

from which the forms we have called "energetic" take their in his journal, on April 16, in Kairouan:

starting point. Where then is the distinction between what we

have called "tectonic forms" and "energetic forms"? It is tonality, It penetrates so deeply and so gently into me,

and above all color, that for Klee will be the true revelation of I feel it and it gives me confidence in myself

energetic forms. If there is, however, a tectonic dynamic then it without effort. Color possesses me. I don't

is always subject to the inflexible law of free fall. It is thus purely have to pursue it. It will possess me always,

"terrestrial" because the tectonic is the terrestrial. For the painter, I know it. That is the meaning of this happy 26 the tectonic dynamic must accede to a superior form, to pure hour: Color and I are one. I am a painter.

energetic form. This is where the painter moves from construction

to "composition." Also worth mentioning are the watercolors from 1914-15, such

"We would like henceforth to give it the musical name of com- as Before the Gates of Kairouan (vo r den Toren v. Kairuan ), View

position" and he adds: "In this received form, the world is not the of St. Germain ( Ansicht v. St. Germain; plate 58), Garden in St. 22 only world possible." Germain, the European Quarter of Tunis ( Garten in der tune-

There are, thus, other "possible worlds." These are the worlds sischen Europaer Kolonie St. Germain)—all of which display an 27 that painting will offer us. These are the "possible worlds" for almost Cezanne-like technique —or In the Kairouan Style ( im Stil

which, with Klee, we shall now search. v. Kairouan with its more marked geometrism. )

Let us return to Klee's theoretical writings—and in particular to

the Bauhaus course (Walter Gropius invited Klee to teach, begin-

APPEARING: THE TERRESTRIAL AND THE ning in 1921, in Weimar and then in Dessau). Having named COSM IC the three characters—the linear, the tonal, and the chromatic—and

What does it mean to speak of multiple "possible worlds"? The having established the terrestrial as the domain of the massive,

"world" is not, nor has it ever been for Klee, a world of substance, it becomes necessary for Klee to interrogate what he calls the

determined once and for all and filled with beings themselves "intermediary milieu" of air and water. This interrogation of inter-

objectively determined. On the contrary, that which is painted in mediary milieu allows him to distinguish quite pertinently between

the painting is the insubstantiality of the world; it is the appearing "rigid rhythms" and "unbounded rhythms." Rigid rhythms, such

of that which appears. An appearing that itself does not appear. as a man climbing a staircase, a falling stone bouncing down

The appearing of that which appears is varied and multiple and an incline, and unbounded rhythms, such as a rising balloon, a

it has nothing to do with the notion of semblance that has always meteor.

accompanied the thesis of the substantiality of the world. What Thus pictorial "composition," which is to hold together con-

the painter tries to make "manifest" is this "appearing." struction and phenomenon, is itself the combination of rigid and

"In this point of conjunction (of the inner and outer vision of unbounded rhythms. This is how, what Klee calls a "superior poly-

things) are rooted the forms created by the hand, completely dis- phony" is formed, and it is how the painting becomes a "superior 28 tinct from the physical aspect of the object but which—on the other organism," a "synthesis of dissemblances" and an "organiza- 29 hand, from the point of view of totality—do not contradict it." It is tion of multiplicity in a unity."

also a matter of "freely creating abstract forms.... These forms But what does this mean? It will suffice for us to continue

achieve a new nature, the nature of the work." 23 the investigation of movement. Klee picks up the analysis of the

Earlier, Klee had spoken of a "resonance between You (the

object) and Me, transcending all optical relation." Is this not, 24 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, L'oeil et I'esprit (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 69. 25 Klee, Tagebucher, #907. again, the distinction we had proposed between the pictorial 26 Ibid., #926o.

27 Klee's admiration for Cezanne should be noted. In 1909, Klee calls him

20 Klee, Ober die moderne Kunst, 17-19. "the master par excellence" (ibid., #8 57). He had visited the Paris Cezanne

21 Klee, Tagebucher, #831 exposition in 1 907.

22 Klee, Uber die moderne Kunst, 45-47. 28 Klee, "Bauhaus Vorlesungen, Wiederholung" [May 15, 1922], 142.

23 Klee, "Wege des Naturstudiums," 126. 29 Klee, "Bauhaus Vorlesungen, Ruckblick" [July 3, 1922], 150. pendulum where he had left off: "Let us free the pendulum from of circulating them on the periphery of a circle— briefly put, the weight." In giving to it a strong impetus, the pendulum is put rainbow lacks the aspect of time. into a continual circular motion until it is stopped. It thus logi- Course number eleven pursues the investigation by posing a 139 cally describes a never-ending circle. The circle is "the purest of question that, by now, has become essential. For, as Klee says, 30 dynamical forms." the question is not "what is red?" (or "what is blue?" etc.). The

Circular movement—the purest of movements—frees us from question the painter refuses here is the question in search of a pendulum movement and from the earth that dominated the definition, the question in search of an object, an essence or a

31 theory of lines and of surfaces. With circular movement (for substance. The question is much more the following: "What is it example that of a spinning top when it encounters no obstacle or that red does not signify? Where does its activity end? What is 33 resistance, or that of the spiral) we penetrate into the "cosmic," its reach?" infinite, movement freed from terrestrial weight. On the contrary, The difference between the two kinds of question is particu- terrestrial movements are finite movements with a beginning and larly important because the second question—the one that is to an end. The analyses of the circle and of its theoretically infi- be posed— is not at all one of definition, object, substance, or nite rotation also introduce us to the superb analyses of color essence. It is, rather, a question in search of the phenomenon that occupy two of the last Bauhaus courses (numbers ten and "red," of red as appearing. How far does it go? Where does it eleven, those from November 28 and December, 12, 1922). end? This is the question of the appearing of color. Thus, in paint-

Here, Klee elaborates what he calls a "topography of color" in ing the relation between appearing and color is affirmed as we accordance with the work of Chevreuil, Goethe's Farbenlehre, have already seen. and Otto Runge's color-circle. He refers, also, to Delacroix and to One might ask how Klee justifies this displacement of the tra-

Cezanne as well as to research by his Bauhaus contemporaries ditional "what is it?" question in favor of the question concerning

Kandinsky and Johannes Itten, and by Delaunay. The "topogra- appearing. It will be useful to return to the chromatic circle, in phy of color" finds its specific place in connection with the chro- which what red does not signify is green, the complement, for matic circle. Thus, he writes in course number ten: red and green cancel each other out (let us note that mixing red

and green gives gray). The active range of red is equivalent to

We free the pendulum of weight, let it loose two-thirds of the circumference, with a culminating red point, an

so that it might enter.. .into the domain of per- extreme "hot" red (yellowish red) and an extreme "cold red"

fect rotation and of complete movement within (bluish red). The other third, from which red is totally absent, is

the symbol of the circle where pure colors are opposite the high point of red and is its complement: green— 32 truly at home. where red is no longer active, where it no longer appears. Klee

has thus responded to the question he posed: "what does red not

Why are pure colors at home in the symbol of the circle? Klee signify, where does it end, what are its limits?" Its limits consist explicates the chromatic circle in the manner of his aforemen- in the two-thirds of the periphery of the circle extending in both tioned predecessors. He places, as they do, the primary colors directions from the culminating red point. The same goes for each

(yellow, red, blue) at three points on the perimeter of the circle of the other primary colors, blue and yellow. and does the same for the secondary colors (orange, purple, Thus the active chromatic range of each color occupies two- green)—each secondary color (composed of the two closest thirds of the periphery of the chromatic circle. Whence we derive primary colors on the circle) is the complement of the primary the following two laws: on the one hand, every primary color's color diametrically across from it. Here, two phenomena can be culminating point is free of the influence of the other two culmi- observed: first, the primary color and its complement are recipro- nating points; on the other hand, each color's range of influence cally engendered in the eye, and second, that there is "gray" occupies two thirds of the periphery of the circle. Hence, two between two colors—this gray will be the center of the circle. All primary colors slide, so to speak, overlap and intrude upon each this is well known, and as Klee knew, the same relation can be other while weakening in this work of overlapping and intruding. established with the diameters of the circle as well as with the And thus at the same time that one color begins, the neighboring perimeter. color has already begun on the circle: it flows for a span of time

It is noteworthy, and particularly important to Klee, that with between the two "appearings" of both colors—and this is, prop-

"peripheral" movement, colors are themselves in an infinite and erly speaking, the rule of polyphony. As Klee explains: continuous movement—which is to say that they acquire the determination "cosmic." This is why the rainbow is an insufficient Each color begins from its nothingness, which representation of color: on the one hand a rainbow is only a is the neighboring summit (the culminating semi-circle, and on the other hand, it juxtaposes colors instead point of the neighboring color), at first weakly,

and rises to its own summit from which it de-

30 Klee, "Padagogische Skizze, Skizze einer Farbenlehre," in Das bildnerische scends again in order to disappear into its Denken, 467-51 and "Bauhaus Vorlesungen 10-11" [Nov. Dec. 1, 28, 5, nothingness which is the other neighboring Dec. 19, 1922], 150ff. 31 Klee, "Bauhaus Vorlesungen 8" [Mar. 20, 1922], 119. 32 Klee, "Bauhaus Vorlesungen 10" [Nov. 28, 1922], 156. 33 Klee, "Bauhaus Vorlesungen 11" [Dec. 19, 1922], 173. . .

summit.... Colors do not resonate on the circle A few lines later he adds, most excellently: "The human in my 37 in a single voice, but rather in a sort of three work does not represent the species but a cosmic point." 140 voiced song. They raise their voices one af- We shall see how, from 1915- 16 until the end of his life, Klee ter the other, as in a canon. At each of the realizes this in painting.

three principal points, one voice culminates, another voice gradually approaches, and a

third voice expires.... One might call this new GENESIS AND RHYTH M 34 figure the canon of totality. In the seventh Bauhaus course, Klee writes:

Have we not, here, come upon the concept of "pictorial polypho- From a cosmic point of view, if there is a given

ny"? Indeed, and it is constructed exactly on the model of musical as such, it is movement, and as infinite force

polyphony. In the latter, there is not a juxtaposition of voices, but it does not need a particular energetic im-

rather a superposition—each voice begins with a certain tempo- pulse. The tranquility of things on the terres-

ral gap or temporal delay relative to the preceding voice. Picto- trial sphere is what materially slows the given

rial polyphony, as described here for the primary colors, is a movement. To take this earthly affiliation as a

polyphony in three movements. norm is mistaken. The history of the work is 38 If circular representation signifies return and repetition, then primarily genesis.

the succession of colors on the circle—this form of color conti-

nuity made of slidings and intrudings— is of a type wholly other And in the July 3, 1922 "Course Retrospective" he says:

than linear or surface continuity. Indeed this chromatic continu-

ity is composed of (dis)continuities (for when a primary color Any work is not, from the outset, a product,

meets another primary color a void of color emerges—grayness). not something which is: the work is in the first

Chromatic (dis)continuity thus admits leaps. Klee expresses this instance genesis, a work that becomes. No

magnificently in writing that with linear and spatial continuity, the work is pre-determined: on the contrary, each

eye is like an animal that grazes and feeds, moving gradually, work begins somewhere in the motif and ac-

whereas in chromatic (dis)continuity, the eye is like a predatory cumulates "organs" from that point, in order 35 39 animal, leaping and jumping. to become an organism.

With the metaphor of polyphony, therefore, we leave behind

the domains of linearity and of weight, the domain that Klee calls This is something that will be repeated many times, like a leitmotif,

the "terrestrial," and we enter into the domain of the "cosmic." notably in Das bildnerische Denken: "Genesis as formal move-

At this point, one must note that Klee had already expressed this ment constitutes what is essential in the work.... Thinking thus less 40 difference of the terrestrial and the cosmic long ago— notably in of form (still life) than of formation."

his Diaries, after reporting the death of Franz Marc at Verdun, The opposition is thus one between form (Gesfa/f), which

March 4, 1916: is like still life, and formation (Gestaltung), which is living, in

movement (meiabole) Expressed otherwise, it is the opposition

From the moment I say who Franz Marc is, I between natura naturata and natura naturans. "On Modern Art"

must say who I am, for much of that in which I is particularly explicit in this regard:

participate belongs equally to him. With Marc,

the thinking of the terrestrial primes the think- Natura naturans brings more (to the artist) than

ing of the cosmos.... The Faustian tendency in natura naturata... his glance plunges deeper

him.... Often in these last days, the fear arose and his horizon is enlarged from the present

in me that one day he would be opposed to to the past.... Instead of a finished image of

me.... My ardor is more of the order of the nature, an image—the only one that matters—of

41 dead and of beings unborn. The passionate creation as genesis imposes itself upon him.

manner of the human is undoubtedly missing

in my art. I do not love animals and the totality What is meant by "Genesis"? Genesis signifies engender-

of beings with a terrestrial heart. Rather, I sub- ing, gestation, and becoming. Genesis implies sperm, egg,

merge myself at first in totality. The terrestrial, originary cell. Plants, animals and humans are so engendered.

for me, cedes place to the thinking of the cos- From thence, an organism is formed. But what is an organism? 36 mic. My love is distant and religious. An organism is a whole, from which one cannot withdraw a part

37 Ibid.

38 Klee, "Bauhaus Vorlesungen 7" [Feb. 27, 1922], 95.

34 Ibid., 176-77. 39 Klee, "Bauhaus Vorlesungen, Ruckblick" [July 3, 1922], 149.

35 Klee, "Bauhaus Vorlesungen 7" [Feb. 27, 1922], 99. 40 Klee, "Philosophie der Gestaltung," in Das bildnerische Denken, 449ff.

36 Klee, Tagebucher, #1008; "Bauhaus Vorlesungen 9" [Apr. 3, 1922], 127. 41 Klee, Uber die moderne Kunst, 41 without destroying the former; it is a whole that is the articulation self. For Klee, rhythm is that through which the work ek-sists; that is of different organs, a whole articulated according to the origi- why Klee does not attempt to transcribe music directly into paint- nary germ, the originary egg. It is from there that one must set out ing but rather to create rhythms proper to painting. Thus, to speak if one is to grasp the living organism. It is necessary, therefore, to as we have of a "musical eye" is not entirely satisfying, it would return to the "matrix" from which genesis is elaborated and from be better to speak of a "rhythmic eye." which the organism unfolds. This is why the painter does not paint A pathic moment without particular pathos, between "feeling" the completed organism, the completed model. Rather, he must and "moving"; such is the rhythmic moment. An energetic moment retrace the paths and movements of genesis, which is why Klee where the issue is one of a "combination of forces," tensions, and affirms, in "On Modern Art" the famous phrase: "To go back what Kant quite justly calls "intensive magnitudes." If the painting,

." 42 ," 46 from the model to the matrix like any higher organism, is a "synthesis of dissemblances if

This is illustrated at the beginning of the lecture by the parable drawing and painting are an "organizing of multiplicity into a

," 47 of the tree: "It would never occur to someone to demand of a tree unity if to look at a painting is to see particular configurations that it form its branches on the model of its roots. Everyone agrees of movement, and if, as Pierre Sauvanet says, rhythm is "a peri-

," 48 that the high cannot be a simple reflection of the low. It is obvious odic structure of movement then without doubt the movement that to different functions, carried out in different orders, must cor- at issue in rhythm is under no condition a displacement within the 43 respond major dissemblance ." painting's space, but rather a transformation, not a kinesis but a

Genesis is unceasing in the work, as it is in the living organ- metabole, that is to say a movement that carries with it "change," ism. It should be recalled that the painting has been described as "alteration" (alloiosis), a becoming-other, or a different becom- a higher organism. An organism, whether natural or superior, is ing. Rhythm coincides with structuration, an active structuration a living composition of differences, of differences that are articu- that puts the work to work—a structuration which is "at work" and lated in the whole, differences that live together in the same time. which "works" in the tableau; rhythm is a field of tensions.

Thus, it is the simultaneity of differences that constitutes the whole This is to say that the different "parts" of the painting (if one of the organism. This is also what distinguishes an organism from still wants to speak in this way, although there are no parts sepa- a numerical series: the organism is an individual (it is indivisible), rable from the whole), its different elements form a whole in the whereas the numerical series is divisible and thus repeatable, an process of formation, reformation, and configuration before our opposition that Klee describes, in the fourth Bauhaus course, as eyes, and yet we cannot determine their starting and end-points.

." 44 the opposition between the "individual" and the "dividual It is Of course, the "pictorial eye" can begin where it wants: this is this unceasing genesis that the painter paints and it is this unceas- because the succession in ordinary vision gives way to a simul- 49 ing genesis that the spectator's eye must see. This return to the taneity of rhythmic totality . Let us recall the formulation we have matrix, this sight of the unceasing genesis of the painting is no already cited—we had purposely left off the ending: easy task for the spectator: his eye— his "optical eye"— is not habit- uated to it and often he sees "nothing" there, that is to say noth- Polyphonic painting is superior to music, to ing other than the represented object or the anecdote conveyed the extent that the temporal element is here in painting. No doubt, only the eye that we have named "musical replaced by the spatial element. The notion eye" or "pictorial eye" can accomplish this task. As Eric Alliez of simultaneity appears here in an ever richer says elegantly of Cezanne: "The concentric eye of the painter, form.... Seeking to place the accent on tempo- sliding in between the leaves of matter, is already no longer the rality, along the lines of a plastic fugue, Delau- 45 eye of Cezanne as a person ." nay chooses a format of a length impossible 50 A painting is genesis, that is to say movement. It is an indivis- to grasp in a single glance . ible whole, thus "individual." How does the "musical eye" of the painter and of the spectator traverse this "individual"? What does We know, also, that Klee was particularly interested in both the

5 ' it create and what does it traverse? It creates and traverses the works and the research of Delaunay and simultaneism. painting rhythmically—although, incidentally, it does not always This means that the spatial in painting is temporal and that the traverse the painting in the same way whenever it looks. temporal is spatial, thanks to this superposition of the sequential

Once again, what is rhythm? Rhythm is an "arch-sensibil- and the simultaneous that rhythm realizes: rhythm is this implica- ity," beneath the objective forms of space and time. As Henri

Maldiney writes: "rhythm is not gnoseological, it is pathic." It is 46 Klee, "Bauhaus Vorlesungen, Wiederholung" [May 15, 1922], 142. not knowledge but existence, which is to say ek-sistence. It is not 47 Klee, "Bauhaus Vorlesungen, Ruckblick" [July 3, 1922], 150. of that a mode representation the painter or the spectator could 48 Pierre Sauvanet, Le rythme et la raison 2: Rythmanalyses (Paris: Kime, objectively adopt but a mode of "presence" to things and to one- 2000), 17-35. See the author's perfect analysis of Klee's painting entitled Rhythmical Rhyth-misches where the author shows how a simple ( ) (1930)

chessboard is transformed into a veritable construction.

42 Ibid., 47. 49 Klee, Uber die moderne Kunst, 17.

43 Ibid., 13. 50 Klee, Tagebucher, #1081.

44 Klee, "Bauhaus Vorlesungen 4" [Jan. 16, 1922], 46-47. 51 See Henri Maldiney's superb analyses of abstract painting in Ouvrir le

45 Eric Alliez and Jean-Clet Martin, L'oeil-cerveau: Nouvelles histoires de la rien—l'art nu (La Versanne: Encre Marine, 2011). Regarding Delaunay, see

peinture moderne (Paris: Vrin, 2007), 457. 205-221. :

of the other and finding there its plenitude. Just

as different juices are formed together in the 142 mouth of a dog.... In this give and take of a thousand reciprocal influences, the interior of

the painting vibrates, hovers in itself, without a 52 single immobile point.

"In rhythm": this means that a painting is neither a document nor

a reproduction of an object: "A painting which has a nude man

as its subject does not represent the structure of human anatomy, 53 but that of the painting itself."

And once again this means that a painting does not present

a state, but rather a process and that it is not made of parts, but

instead, of "resonances/dissonances." It is the appearing of a

field of tensions.

THE EXPERIENCE OF PICTORIAL RHYTHM

We shall now experience rhythm in a few paintings by Klee,

through the three implied components structure, periodicity, and 54 Fig. 1: Paul Klee ( 1 879- 1 940), Moonrise over St. Germain movement.

( Mondaufgang [St. Germain]), 1915/242. Watercolor and pencil on Among the watercolors from 1914-15, which emerge from paper on cardboard, 18.4x 17.2 cm, Museum Folkwang Essen, Inv. C Klee's trip to Tunisia, we shall analyze Moonrise over St. Germain 2/58.

( Mondaufgang [St. Germain]) (1915; fig. 1 ). Structure a layout composed of large, rectangular masoned

tion of space in time. Is then rhythm not what we had already blocks of somewhat imprecise contours (the fluidity of watercolor)

encountered in terms of equilibrium, "an equilibrium which is and of various colors: blue, yellow, red, green, brown, black, and

not symmetry"? Is this rhythmic equilibrium not the fundamental white. Pale colors, as if washed out, bleached no doubt by the

determination of abstraction in paintinq? Is it not this equilibrium shining white of the full moon, round, above the blocks. From the

(which is no. symmetry) t hat Klee calls 'Harmon^ "geometrism" of the form of the blocks one senses that Klee is

This implies the three criteria of rhythm that Sauvanet has drawing close to what he calls the cubist reduction: a reduction

emphasized: structure, periodicity, and movement. Here we must to simple geometrical forms.

note the following: Structure is not series. For series is "dividual," Periodicity: arising from the shifts in colors and from the multi-

or divisible (for example a numerical series), whereas structure is plicity of blocks, distributed from left to right (or from right to left,

"individual," indivisible like an organism. Periodicity, that is reit- according to the direction of the gaze) and from bottom to top.

eration or repetition, is not identity, for repetition is transformation. The blocks are juxtaposed and yet embedded or slightly super-

Movement is a field of tensions and the definitional core of rhythm. imposed upon each other, some passing in front or behind other

Rilke (a friend of Klee) wrote in a similar vein to his wife, after ones. This color shift, together with the passing of the blocks in

having visited the Paris Salon in 1907 dedicated to Cezanne: front of or behind one another, produces a clear structural rhythm.

Movement: Doubled in the gaze: on the one hand, the

The Salon closes today. And already. ..the structural rhythm of colors and of juxtapositions and differences

grand color-architecture of the Woman on red between blocks, on the other hand, a more unbounded rhythm of

sofa turns out to be as difficult to memorize attraction directed upward, as if the blocks were drawn toward

as a long decimal. And yet I was overcome the moon above and as if, simultaneously, the latter emerged

by it, figure by figure. It is as if every point from the former. A slow rising of the moon above the blocks

of the picture were conscious of every other appears as the slow rising of the blocks toward the moon. In this

one. Inasmuch as each one participates, each watercolor, it seems also that the lines of construction and the

combines in it adaptation and refusal; each lines of force not only co-habitate but also superimpose them-

keeps watch over and protects the equilibrium selves on one another and are identical. Another movement,

in its own way. So much so that, in the final another advent of rhythm emerges when we look upon the dark

analysis, the entire painting poses a counter-

52 Rilke to Carla Rilke, Oct. 22, 1907 in Rainer Maria Rilke, Briefe iiber weight to reality.... It becomes, therefore, an Cezanne (Frankfurt: Insel, 1981). issue of colors and their interrelations, each 53 Klee, Tagebucher, #840. one concentrating, affirming itself in the face 54 We are here following Sauvanet's analytical schema. ) ) :

bands, those that are central as well as the lateral ones, produce

an effect of perspectival distance insofar as they narrow while receding from us, and the strata composing them shrink in width 143 and breadth as they grow distant, producing a true perspectival

effect. But is this an effect of depth-perspective or of height-per-

spective as Klee had carefully analyzed it in the Bauhaus lectures

when he attempted to describe the look of a tall building from

the bottom? Lifting our eyes, we are beset with vertigo. Thus one

can say that the bands and the strata draw us toward a gulf,

as toward a vanishing point, but a gulf of height, and the "prin-

cipal path" leads us away as on a steep and difficult staircase

that takes our breath away. Breathless, vertiginous—the inverse

of rhythm.

Periodicity: The strata that fill up both sides of the vertiginous

central strip, as they do its interior, constitute a complex periodic-

ity, as one can determine neither their law nor their calculable

logic.

Movement In addition to the perspectival diminution and the

vertigo of the gaze from bottom to top, there are other move-

ments. In fact, can one not see that the rigid and solid central ver-

tical strip (the main path) induces numerous movements to which

the lateral bands, and all those on both sides of the central band

are subjected? It seems that, by its mass and rigidity, it prevents

all the other bands and strata from occupying the territory that

they would need, pushing them back. Hence what is induced is Fig. 2: Paul Klee, Highway and Byways ( Hauptweg und Nebenwege ), 1929/90. Oil on canvas, 183.7 x 67.5 cm, Museum Ludwig, Cologne, what Klee calls a "combat of lines" among the bands. Due to the

Inv. ML 76/3235. action of the central vertical band, the lateral bands and the hori-

zontal strata constrict and press up against each other, producing blocks (black or brown) on the left, beneath the moon, forming, an unceasing disequilibrium that makes each contort, resisting like the blades of a propeller on the verge of starting to turn in an the other, defending themselves, circumventing and sometimes imperceptible wind, a rhythm—muted, imminent. destroying one another. A com bat of lines: shock and counter-

Other paintings from 1917-23 are closer to the cubist phe- shock, contortions of avoidance, compressions and contractions. nomenon of "reduction." Thus the painting of 1923 entitled Geological buckling or the folding of a fan, condemned to unfold

Harmony of Quadrilaterals in Red, Yellow, Blue, White, and and re-fold itself endlessly. Some of these movements seem to

Black ( Harmonie a us Vierecken m it rot gelb blau weiss und efface the strata, to reduce others, and make others appear, as if schwarz composed of squares and rectangles of unequal dimen- the multiplicity of strata, under the domination of the central strip, sions and primary colors, amongst which are inserted black and had to reconfigure itself incessantly in order to continue to exist, white squares, also of unequal dimensions. These quadrilaterals, as if an initial juxtaposition and succession, a sort of pre-history of unequal and in no distinguishable order, induce the slightest shift, the painting, anterior to the painting, as its past, were to transform a trembling beneath the gaze. The inequality of the structures, the itself into simultaneity, becoming visible in the present of the pic- dissymmetry of colors and placement engenders a movement of ture. A history of the painting becomes legible: a dis-equilibrium pulsation that constitutes the rhythm of the painting. The picture seems to reign constantly, whilst being never the same: a dis-equi- does not represent any story, any anecdote, and this is, precisely, librium that never stabilizes, an unstable equilibrium/dis-equilib- abstraction. rium. A combat of lines: momentary non-symmetrical equilibrium,

In 1929, with the painting entitled Highway and Byways asymmetrical balance, a vertiginous and rhythmic equilibrium/

( Hauptweg und Nebenwege (1929; fig. 2), a more startling dis-equilibrium. Forces of resistance, forces of invasion, forces of reduction and a more complex rhythm emerges in a multitude of disappearance confront one another, folding and re-folding in a nuances of pale and non-uniform colors. field of tensions.

Structure: Vertical strips and horizontal strata. The vertical At the top and bottom of the painting, long blue horizontal strips are entirely populated by the horizontal strata, which fill strata support the entirety of the picture—three above, one below, the painting. The vertical band situated almost at the center of the surround the painting like a rail, containing the strata and bands, painting (slightly shifted over to the right), the only one to be per- and prevent them, perhaps, from spreading beyond the painting. fectly rectilinear, appears very rigid, stable and immobile. This Two other paintings from the same period, Monument in Fertile

central vertical band recedes from us, toward the top, or into the Country ( Monument i m Fruchland and Individualized ) (1929) depth, as do the lateral bands (lateral paths). All of the vertical Measurement of Strata ( individualisierte Hohenmessung der 1 w 1 1 1 : , •

• * * i»n Mil iifip nique? Is it not, rather, a technique comparable to that of mosaic • »»»»• 1 * «»••••••- - »•»»»** **I*S* — — * |l|tt|>|VlCIII*‘ fill • Mill Mi •. i i j j :: iv. : : :;AV, ! :.v.i : IlMMlIHM^ »•••• ••••* iim lag Him • 55 • III MiillMli tessellation, a technique of riddling? Additionally, in the corner HlltlillH 1 i • • i :lM(lllll|IH< • • lIlMllli r —mr;ii«gi ||«I I l t I « I * > 111 him . miii iiMIMiir illlllll«llll>MII«IMMI * • •MlllMIII of the frame, above and to the right—more precisely a uniform un- MiiaaMiiiBiiiiiiililM • MM !• • a •«••«• 144 • M » illftIBM Immiii > I ' *( > 1 1 ' aiaanaaaa* IllHlUlMMl III ! ! I '.‘.Iff.’ “.'.“.V.'.L' ifllll *» • B«aa «• riddled red angle appears, as if it were another painting entering • •«»BallB«a «ai llllllfl Hi/li .It!* '.V 99 U* aa l *|l IIIMIlMaiMHl Hiilltl i «« « al« into this one. On the three other sides, the painting is framed by hmmiiVn'riY.'Al.’.V.iv/fii » ••til• 5 1 « * • HM1I I Hllltlll tit • • *>1 .. . W.V.V.V.'i l|l|M IMl lit large riddled bands dominated by black points, and on the left »«••* I ?•**•••••• •iSmH till »»«itB««a r.v.v.v.v.'.v.v.w.tv.v.v.rl M 1 IM*|lhll, 1 side, a cut made by a black un-riddled band. Above and to the • • •««•••• *« «« i I , mii • * «•*«*• iiViiiii! i'll',! ! ! J « • . , i iiu "* * •»*** • ••*•»•»* l mmiu ! V. A*.v v. f ••*.S3 HHHb left, a semi-circle in a thin black line. ’ * * * . 1 1 i*i *' »>*r**t*..: ,,,, . i Him iiiiiM!’? Lt Periodicity: The structural rhythm is provided by this repetition

of innumerable black and red points, by this tessellation compa-

rable to a long hail storm—or like a visual ritornello, creating a

constant discontinuity, in which the multiplicity of points would

be like a return to the unique point of initiation. Is this riddling l««^« I"’ --.to. - - !««!«!,, lMBI«» a "MMI*i;i*iiiiii|i^mJ'JIJM.. Mii«iM«« i»i I|«iii aaa i ••Bill with points and small regular tessellations not exactly what Klee M l i|«a iliagla i a Hfl«Ml | "i* a mmbibbib 1 1 hb« aaiBaBtH > < 1 iiivt Vlililt* t • I*'*’'.' '.i' ' describes as the exit out of chaos, from the initial gray point? A MM|il|l»l 1’»l aaa«.t»a ii>MMiMHniHi)»iiini ltlll l,>ll|l » iiiiiiM.ini.iiiiiKitiiiiimiiiMi..Ml M ,>->•»*•< • !••••*(ll«l|fllllli|lii|iMlli‘“ IBIIMIMMMI ** 1 ••••»•# ritornello of the origin? • ||*| #•••»•** • • I lint IftBBM MllfIMMItIM

,,lM 1 1 1 • 1 1 1 k%i* ««i•«««««ltlkllil|llMK|lll|Miiini ‘|llM|l|l • Vl . . U . .! St t V Movement: Many rhythmic movements are interwoven here. iilliiMii **’ 11 1 » an »m««nm« '* ,,t On the one hand, the movement of riddling: it seems to cover the mil a** ,, * ..

»** surface of the canvas, but also to "discover" it: it discovers the

a i a a > V a •• • painting in its beginning to exist from out of the primal chaos, mak-

ing manifest the very essence of painting. What is painted is the

BB IV888PR .iifiiiiMHai very act and gesture of the painter: covering and uncovering. It

is both movements at once: covering and uncovering, the essen- ? .*.* * w:.* : tial function of painting—already an elementary pictorial rhythm.

Sajfr What is more, if the painting is almost entirely riddled, filled almost * ««««»• •*•»*•< , ;»•»»! I I I I* Hill • yi**» l 'J.II| • I I I. i * a 1 * > * a » a* « 1 « r •*•**• a a a»i» , iMia ,,,,,a * M a Mi M«B»Bi*»«BB*iMi»i 11 at >mb* *aMin» left aillMI 1 * 11 * a M>|l|llll * * ••••••• Bit BB Ml»f I'BMI'B For the lateral band on the and the two horizontal bands •«•»••• aaiiilfiiMiMfin !••*«• him til' - ••••# - I B I lllr iiM**HIH HiMimMH ’M**'tll'l***ai|l|fMlM|f I |» t n * 1 . M; IB IIM MMIMBI B BBIB H M • above and below are riddled more clearly and more extensively

by black than by red points. The red points occupy more of the

interior of the painting than the framing strips. Furthermore, a tri-

Fig. 3: Paul Klee, Semi-circle with Features ( Halbkries Angular zu angle of bleached tessellations, or rather tessellations in the pro-

Winklingem ), 1932/5. Watercolor and gouache on paper on cess of being bleached out, is inscribed in the left-hand third and cardboard, 48 x 30 cm, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, up until the center of the canvas: is this not also, in some way, the Dusseldorf, Inv. Nr. 28. appearance of a white chaos, with which with the surroundings,

Lagenj (1930), evidence comparable techniques. In these two more black than red, contrast: appearance or disappearance?

paintings, though, the strata and vertically and horizontally strati- The entire painting vibrates in itself, giving out luminous waves,

fied constructions (also of unequal dimensions, but in livelier and like endless visual "vocalizations"—the gaze, struck endlessly—

more contrasting colors) are dominated by a strict, regulated free, as Klee wrote, to begin looking wherever it wishes. The gaze

geometricality. It is in the inequality of the segments and of the is "contained" by the frame, but not constrained by it. An intensive

colors that movement is born—a slow movement, as if the painting palpitation of colors. No representation, no anecdote here, just

were slowly to turn around upon itself. In Monument in Fertile the reduction to pure abstraction. The painting does not narrate

Country, where yellow is dominant, it is the large central trape- any history beyond the temporality of painting and its implemen-

zoid, made of multiple colored strips, that seems to put the whole tation: what covers the painting dis-covers it as painting.

into rotation. In Individualized Measurement of Strata, a similar The same year, 1932, other paintings put to work techniques

rotation is initiated by the red square, like a decentered center. A of riddling and small regular tessellation, such as the famous Ad

rhythm of folding is wedded to a rhythm of rotation, which begins Parnassum, but also Boy in Fancy Dress ( Costumierter Knabej, in

either from the trapezoid or the square. which the motif (the child) seems taken by surprise by the tessel-

In 1932 the reduction proceeds in a completely different lations that cover him.

manner. Consider the painting entitled Semi-circle with Angular In 1937, the reduction is carried out in still another form, that

( (fig. is Features fialbkreis zu Winkligem ) 3). of an extreme schematization. Such the picture entitled Area of

Structure: A multiplicity of regular points, of red or black tonal-

ities, aligned from left to right (or from right to left, according to

55 It is well known that Klee saw and admired the mosaics of the Lateran the direction of the gaze) constitute the totality of the painting. Is Church in Rome and those in Ravenna during his almost six-month stay in

this, as some critics have suggested, a pointillist or divisionist tech- Italy in 1902. .

places its heel on the ground, another lifts the tip away from the

ground. It is as if they were animated by a striding motion. Better yet, the arms stretch out horizontally, the hands pointing upward 145 or downward— like the balancing of a tightrope walker (some-

thing Klee both painted and described in his Bauhaus courses).

Some figures appear to skate, others to dance, turning around

rapidly—all seem more or less to lift themselves above the ground.

Some have seen here what commentators have observed in the

Egyptian hieroglyphs of the kind that Klee had seen during his

recent trip to Egypt. What seems more important to us, however,

is that the reduction of these very small figures that one seems

to see from afar or from above, preserves only the form of the

gesture and of the simple action: walking, running, or dancing.

Of the figure as figure nothing appears. All anecdote is

absent, all figurative particularity pushed aside; there remains

nothing but the simple gesture of walking, of running, or of danc-

ing, in its simple appearing— like a pure diagram of movement. A

gesture, seemingly threatened by a vacillation or a tottering that

is controlled by the equilibrium of the walker, runner, or dancer,

an incessant conquest and re-conquest of that equilibrium, the

"non-symmetrical equilibrium"—which is to say a rhythm. The end-

less agitation of these figures emerges in a succession/simultane-

ity that comprises a coordinated movement, inside and outside

the supple and unbounded contortions of the picture. Another

question emerges still: are these figures a multiplicity of different

figures or one sole figure deployed in different moments of walk-

ing, running, or dancing? Are there multiple figures, or rather one

single figure that evolves in time? Expressed otherwise: between

multiplicity and unity, between continuity and discontinuity, the

rhythm of walking, running, or dancing is played out here—or

rather the movement in its succession is translated into simultane-

Fig. 4: Paul Klee, Area of High Spirits ( Gelande zu Ubermutes), ity on the canvas. Or again: the space of the picture is temporal, 1937/78. Charcoal and sanguine on cotton on mount, 43 x 26 cm, its time is spatial. Space implies time, time implies space: this is sold at Christie's June 201 1 21 , rhythm. Did Klee not write that simultaneity translates pictorial

High Spirits ( Gelande des Ubermutes (fig. polyphony better than succession in musical polyphony? ) 4)

Structure: The gaze is first of all struck by a sinuous form and From 1938 to 1940, other paintings, such as Handbill for

hemmed in by a large, clearly visible black dash—a river-like Comedians ( Werbeblatt der Komiker ), Flora on the Rocks ( Flora meandering with multiple branches, rising from the bottom to the am Felsenj, or the superb Kettledrummer ( Paukenspieler now ) top of the canvas, where it opens like an estuary. Or rather, like produce a reduction "to rhythm" of an extreme intensity and den- a labyrinth made of detached and fluid spirals and loops with no sity. rectilinear geometrical constructions. The only thing visible is the The "reduction" for Klee, then, is not only a reduction to more sinuousness, the looping, spiral construction, in addition to the primitive geometrical forms such as the triangle, rectangle, and play of an unbounded and fluid rhythm. circle, nor is it just the multiplication of "profiles" of figures or of

Periodicity: At the heart of this supple structure, the gaze is things. The most important reduction for Klee occurs in the sup- aroused by the sight of a multitude of extremely schematized fig- pression of any kind of anecdotal form, or any representation: a ures traversing the picture. It is as if it is populated (or invaded) reduction to gesture and to the unfolding of an action—a reduction by multiple small stick-like figures, like people made from two thin to movement that allows nothing but movement itself to appear. A strokes: two legs that end in two feet that stand flat on the ground; reduction where movement appears in its purest pictorial reality, a vertical torso, always stick-like; often two stick-like arms, either that of a transformation of succession into simultaneity—a reduc- horizontal or pointing with their hands upward or downward; tion to rhythm, and consequently to abstraction; something that is finally, a round head endowed with a single eye. The legs and at work in all painting, where the gaze does not see the thing as the arms seem to be animated by an irresistible movement. an object but rather as the trajectory and movement of appearing.

Movement: The figures walk, run, or dance. Their legs are spread apart for walking, running, or dancing. The two legs rest on the ground in each case, but every time differently: where one itself, and its mobility—in theory infinite— is its rhythm—a fluid rhythm,

RHYTHM ONCE MORE: DRAWINGS without fits and starts, emerging from out of itself and returning

AND ETCHINGS thence unceasingly. In the Bauhaus courses as we have seen, the

Klee's numerous drawings, in pencil, pen, or chalk, must be spiral is an infinite movement, like the circle. classified in the category of "tonality," as he himself has defined The movement of the spiral is visible equally in the pen drawing it: the "black and white," the chiaroscuro. Hardly Still Walking, Not Yet Flying geht kaum mehr, fliegt noch (

This dual tonality constitutes in itself a rhythm: a first, primitive nicht) (plate 15) also from 1927. The simple and fluid outline of a rhythm, upon which is superimposed another, equally primitive walking man, accompanied at eye-level and shoulder-height by a rhythm elaborated by lines, namely the rhythm of continuity and twisting of soft lines resembling wings in movement, and produc- discontinuity. These two modalities—black and white, continuous ing a kind of visual vertigo. Between walking and flying, between and discontinuous—are undoubtedly the very origin of rhythm, its rhythm and vertigo. emergence, not for the "optical eye" but for the "musical" or "picto- Still other fluid and unbound rhythms: the pencil or chalk draw- rial" eye—that eye which we have referred to as the "rhythmic eye." ings from 1933 such as Accusation in the Street [Anklage auf der

Rhythm, in Klee's drawings and etchings, is developed in sev- Strassej, Manhunt [ Menschen/agdj Violence [ Gewalt Barbarian , ) , eral different ways: "structural rhythms," "unbounded rhythms," Mercenary Barbaren-Soldner and Emigrating auswandern ( ), ( )

"continuous rhythms," as explicated in the Bauhaus courses. (plates 47, 49, 46, 51, 54). Here, the rhythm of black and white

tonality results in a multiplicity of features that makes up each indi-

vidual figure. Each figure, distinct in the space of the drawing, is,

STRUCTURAL RHYTHMS nonetheless, filled with lines that are tangled up in one another,

( is Tightrope Walker Seiltanzer ) (1923; plate 20), undoubt- undulating and floating, spinning or spiraling. The density, the edly the prototype for the collection of drawings and etchings entanglement and involvement of the lines in each figure precisely that belong to the 1920s: a complex construction of lines com- produce what one might call a "panic rhythm": that of Germany in posing horizontality and verticality, an asymmetric equilibrium 1933 and Hitler's rise to power. where an unexpected object is multiplied: the ladder. A mark of "Panic of lines," panic rhythm: the palpitations, vibrations, ascent, but also of possible fall, the ladder is both the formative twitchings and convulsions of bodies, wracked with trembling; element and the motor of these drawings, for it is a matter not wounded, menacing or menaced, terrorized. Bodies whose limbs of a scene of represented objects, but of an event. An ascent, a are in disharmony: sometimes a frontal view whose face is none- walk across a tightrope, a possible fall: the lines here are what theless in profile, haggard, turned away from the body in terror.

Klee calls "acts of mobility," of energies, that originate from a We "see" these bodies shake. vanishinq point that cannot be localized within the paintinq itself. Horror or sadness show themselves in speed or in slowness: the

The repetition and multiplication of lines, as "acts of mobility.' speed of pursuit, a desperate flight—or else the kind of slow depar- constitute the rhythm of the work, which is nothing other than the ture, heavy and melancholic, that confers a quasi-immobility onto implication of space and time, in verticality and horizontality. the drawing Emigrating; a sort of movement without displacement,

This "combat of lines" with (and contrary to) gravity, becomes almost "on the spot," an infinite exhaustion. In such breathless,

apparent in the drawings Entertainer in April ( Gaukler im April unbound rhythms, the entire, each time, vibrates. )

(1928; plate 22) and From Gliding to Rising ( von Gleiten zu Such is the rhythm of the figures from 1933: an unbound but

Steigen) (1923; plate 18), which is composed of multiple direc- desperate rhythm, a field of extreme tensions, not only a "combat tional arrows such as can be found similarly in other paintings. of lines," but also a field of figural confrontations, a field of trem-

Equally typical is a drawing from 1915, Death for the Idea (Der blings, a "whirling," a vertigo "made visible" by pencil, pen or

Tod fur die Idee (plate where it is collapse and dissolution chalk, to the "musical" eye, the pictorial eye: to the rhythmic eye. ) 61 ), toward the depths that impose themselves, and not an ascent toward a height. THE RHYTHM OF GENESIS AND THE GENESIS OF RHYTHM: THE SINGLE FLUID AND UNBOUNDED RHYTHMS PENCIL STROKE

With Geometric Spiral geometrische Spiralej 1 plate The drawings from the last years of Klee's life (1939-40), ( ( 927; 27) we arrive at fluid and unbounded rhythms. The spiral is composed display a notable specificity, most typically in the magnificent of vertical bands colored red, yellow, and blue, and outside of the drawings from the series Angels, of the same period. To these we spiral, a directional arrow indicates the point toward which the can apply a formula drawn from ancient Chinese painting: "the bands converge, narrowed in the extreme toward the point which work is born of a single stroke of the brush." is at the same time the re-emergence of the movement of the spiral. Indeed, Klee's drawing is now made of a simple stroke, a

On the other side of the arrow and spiral a large circular blue precise, unblurred line, producing figures and forms that are point appears to indicate both a projection of the point of origin, extremely simplified and often deformed. Formation and defor- and the endlessness of the movement that transforms the spiral into mation: we have the impression of a single continuous line that circular motion. The spiral is thus not static, it turns and returns upon produces a figure composed of differentiated and dissimilar ) a

parts that yet constitutes a whole that could have been produced First, the quasi-continuity of the outline. No longer is there a

almost without discontinuity, almost without lifting the pencil. multiplicity of lines fleshing out the figures, as was the case in the This quasi-continuity of the stroke or of the outline can be seen drawings from 1933. There is just one single and unique line. A 147 in almost all of the drawings from this period. Let us look closely line that is interrupted, occasionally, in order to be reconstituted,

at Last Word in the Drama ( letztes Wort im Drama from 1938 to continue its path and to pursue its drawing. These brief blank )

(plate 44). We see a figure: on the left side of the drawing, the intervals and resumptions of the line affirm the periodicity of a

line of the neck continues, without stopping, into an ear and into rhythm that stops and begins again. There is a "change" of the wavy hair, in an asymmetric spiral. There, on the forehead, we black line in its blank spaces. The continuity is in the changing.

can make out a break in the line, a blank interval, and then the This rhythmic outline composes the drawing into an "organ-

line begins again, moving on into a black eye, and without break, ism," an "individual arrangement"—which is to say it is indivisible.

the arch of an eyebrow and a nose. Below the nose, a brief blank The drawing is itself an organism, a living, "natural" organism.

interval, then the line takes up again to form a mouth, followed This "naturality" is as Klee says "a new nature," for Klee does without interruption by a chin and, to the right of the drawing, an not depict the nature of man, but the "nature of the work." As he

ear. Again, a blank interval, and the line picks up again to form also says, painting a naked man is not a matter of painting the

a loop and in a rounded and clear eye, in complete dissymmetry anatomy of the human species, but the anatomy of the painting

from the black eye on the left side. As our description has shown, or of the drawing.

there are, in this drawing, barely three moments at which the pen- But where does this continuously unfolding line begin? Where

cil line is interrupted, three moments of discontinuity in the line, in does it end? Where is the point from which it takes its departure,

the single line of the drawing, three moments when the artist lifted where is its originary germ? Our eye indeed searches for the

the pencil. Apart from these three blank moments, the black line point of emergence of the line or of the trace, but it does not

is continuous and, in these three blank moments, effects a "leap," find it. Or rather: it finds many possible points whence the line

initiates an interval in order to reinstate itself and continue. The could have been born, but our eye cannot decide between these

figure is composed of a single and quasi-continuous stroke. Thus, possible points of departure and there are thus multiple possible

the "leap" of the black line, the brief interruption, the "blank," is, trajectories for one and the same quasi-continuous line. The simul-

in Klee's own formulation, not comparable to an animal grazing, taneity of the possible points of departure and possible trajecto-

step by step, but rather to the leap of the predatory animal— ries puts to work the implication of space and of time—which is

leap that does not interfere with the continuity of the trajectory: the definition of rhythm, thus the genesis is given in the work itself:

the discontinuity is inscribed within the continuity and this is the "the work retraces the path and the movements of its genesis," as

rhythm of this drawing, of this "single pencil line." Klee puts it. We cannot distinguish (we must not distinguish) the

The same singularity of line and the same quasi-continuity product from the production, the figure from its genesis: the figure

of the stroke can be found in almost all the drawings from the is the very appearing of its genesis; "natura naturans" is given in

Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern, dating from 1939 to 1940. Such is "natura naturata."

the case with Uneven Flight ( unebene Fluchtj (1939; plate 14), Thus, it is not only in the "chromatics" of painting, but equally which is more complex because here the angled lines are more in the "tonality" of drawing that Paul Klee reaches the pure

numerous than the rounded ones, and in which a running figure is essence of rhythm.

composed (or decomposed), legs widely stretched out and arms

extending, one pointing upward and the other down, in rhythmic Translated by Hakhamanesh Zangeneh, California State University

accord with the legs. Stanislaus

In Superior Bird ( hoherer Vogel plate the straight ) (1940; 16)

lines, tracing incomplete quadrilaterals, are dominant, but their Edited by Peter Hanly, Boston College

tracing too is quasi-continuous.

In 1940 still, in Eidola: Erstwhile Philosopher (EIAQAA: wei-

land Philosoph (plate 60) and Flight ( Fluchtj (plate 25) one finds

the same quasi-continuous line, but in the first case in the figure

at rest, in the second, a mad sprint. The same can be said for

It ( the pastel Stick Out! durchhalten !) from 1940 (plate 43), a

figure almost entirely folded in upon itself, as if enveloped by

itself. Looking at the magnificent ink drawing No! (Nein!) (1940;

plate 42), we find a thin and precise line, quasi-continuous, and a

figure almost immobile, but so concentrated upon itself in refusal,

resistance, and opposition, by the firmness of its vertical stature

and the extreme contraction of its fingers, that we are left with the

impression of an unequalled force and energy.

How can we here gather together the characteristics of the

drawings from 1939 to 1940 that we have listed so far?

Marcia Sa Cavalcante Schuback The Poetics of the Sketch

As life and death, so too, day and night belong together in an extreme way. Their belonging together is

extreme not only because one cannot exist without the other but for the way in which they co-exist. Indeed,

if one is there as present, the other is also there, but as absent. The extremity of the one is already the other.

They belong together as rhythm. This rhythmical alternation shows precisely how day and night belong

together in the extreme. Rare and magical it is, however, when day and night are discovered together, either

in different scales of twilight and/or in eclipse. The same could be said of the belonging together of word

and image. Where there is image there is also word and the other way around, but in this extreme way of

belonging together in a rhythmical alternation such that the one is absent in order that the other be present.

Rare and magical it is, too, when word and image are discovered together, as in the works of Paul Klee.

One of Klee's watercolors is called The Scales of Twilight ( Die Waage der Dammerung) plate 5). (1921 ;

It shows the scales of the ongoing movements of a coming-to in which opposites are discovered together,

displaying the magical sharpness of the vague and the clarity of confusion. Circle-figure eclipsed by line-

letter, one superimposed over the other, showing appearings in their own withdrawal; instead of light and

darkness, background and figure, we see the coming-to-light and the coming-to-darkness, and further still,

background as figure and figure as background. What is seen is the becoming-figure and the becoming-

ground. At the center, a wheel, the turning wheel of a ride on the subtle energy of a light radiation that

shows how line is nothing but energy; plants and buildings indicating a natural thickness become the art-

ist's line-drawing and vice versa; scales of distances show nearness approaching, and the enigma of the

belonging-together of nearness and distance gets closer and closer, clearer and clearer. The whole scene

of the scales of twilight is about coming-to. It is presented within the light and dark nuances of brightness.

Here we find a fundamental lesson of Klee's works on the way in which words and images, like day and

night, light and darkness, or life and death are nothing but the moving of one toward the other. Because both are movements toward another, we are concerned with movements toward movements and not with

fields in connection to fields. Word-movement moves toward image-movement: their relation is a coming

from one to the other.

Because the origin and the ends of their movements are already and still movements, it would not be

possible to describe their movement of one-toward-the-other by means of a theory of movement that merely

pursues the way in which things move in space and time in order to measure their distance or proximity, to

evaluate their relative proportions and define the limits of their realms. Word and image are not things in

movement but moving movements. That is a fundamental lesson of Klee. They are movements generating

movements. They are motional insofar as they are emotional.

Since they are not things in movement but rather moving movements, to describe their movements as the

passage from one point to another (from day to night, from light to darkness, from life to death, from word to

image or the other way around) would be mistaken. Thus, one is already the other as not yet being the other.

It would be wrong, too, to describe these kinds of movement (life, death, day, night, light, darkness, word,

image, nature, and art) as passages "from-to" because they are in themselves already out and beyond 149 themselves. The "from-to" is, so to speak, inside them. A mov- forming forces Formenden rather than to accomplished forms ( ) ing movement cannot be conceived teleologically as a "from-to" (Form-enden) a "possible" meaning of a philosophical view, a

." 4 150 because there is nothing substantive here such as would belong "being a philosopher precisely without wanting to be Indeed, to the idea of a thing. It is rather the "going through all things, philosophers are in some sense "negative pedagogues." If the

being itself nothing, namely, nothing such that it could always vision of forming forces can be called a philosophical vision, it is

be otherwise," to recall a passage by Schelling in his Initia because the very idea of "idea" is about to be transformed and,

1 Philosophiae Universae . A moving movement is ungraspable, to a certain extent, returned to its original meaning of eidos and

slipping away from attempts to reach it through a logic of con- idea, that is, of the invisible force that shows possible meanings

trasts and opposition through which a static and neat line could of the visible in visible meanings of the possible. What probably

be drawn between before and after, here and there, this and made Klee hesitate to call the vision of the invisible forming forces

that, si and sol. It is not graspable by means of concepts insofar "philosophical" was the necessity he felt of conceiving the coin-

as the concept obeys the principles of non-contradiction, of iden- cidence of both realms—the invisible and the visible—and thereby

tity and of the excluded middle, the rational directive to avoid denying the sense of form as a passage from a before-form to

confusion. A moving movement is in itself already another, as an after-form, from the invisible to the visible. What philosophy 6

day is already night, as life is already death, as word is already seems to see but fails to conceive of is the movement in its moving

image, art still nature, and the other way around. Moving move- event, the forming in its forming, the becoming in its coming-to-be,

ments withdraw from the realm of representation: how would it where contraries coincide and become confused. For Klee this

be possible to reproduce what is visible only in and as its own happens because philosophical thought is deeply attached to

invisibility? Ungraspable, unconceivable, unrepresentable, mov- discursive language that— missing the capacity to say the multidi-

ing movements—in the sense of that which is itself already other rectional temporal structure of a becoming—tends to reduce it to

than itself—can, however, be made visible. "Art does not repro- a linear sequence of befores and afters. Philosophy lacks, there-

duce the visible; it makes visible," to recall the most repeated fore, concepts that would enable it to describe the movement

words of Paul Klee. Art makes visible movement as the ground in the "whiling" of its event, the eventfulness of the movement.

2 of, and for all becoming, another fundamental lesson of Klee . Therefore, philosophy departs from the form in order to reach the

But how? forming, from the eternal to reach the temporal, the repose to the

It does so by making visible the moving of movement. This movement.

"making visible" demands, however, a detachment, and even To describe the moving meanwhile of the movement, the coin-

an abandonment, of a world of things based upon an under- cidence of the coming-to-form and the formed, Paul Klee proposes

standing of the thing as that which is accomplished, formed and another mode of description. He suggests the path of simile (like-

shaped, individualized and autonomous—that is, as object. "I ness, Gleichnis). "The genesis of 'writing' is a very good simile of 5 want to observe the dimension of objects in a new sense trying movement," he claims . Rather than a "necessary metaphor" or a

to show how the artist arrives at this apparently arbitrary 'defor- development of comparisons leading to analogy the meaning of ,

." 3 mation' of the natural forms of appearances These words of simile suggested by Klee is rather the force of multivocity emerg-

Klee speak about deformation in the sense of moving the eyes ing through and beyond univocal and equivocal significations.

away from pre-formed forms, from forms carried through to an The polysemy of the words Genesis—both beginning, and the bib-

end—Form-enden—in order to discover within the formed the form- lical narrative about the beginning—and Schrift—the Bible and its

ing forces, Formenden. The demand, however, is neither to leave writing—presents the simile as an experience of direction rather

behind the realm of forms, nor to vandalize or abuse the forms, than of signification. The simile disavows the metaphorical: it says

but rather to learn to unlearn the formed—the images—in order merely, as Kafka once remarked, "that the incomprehensible is

to rediscover the power of seeing within the formed the coming- incomprehensible, and we know that already." Disavowing the

to-a-form, in images the coming-to-image, in being the coming- metaphorical, the simile shows what is in its gerundive is being; it

to-be. An expression by the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa— shows the already known, exposing the polysemy already oper-

"learn to un-learn"—can help us to understand the pedagogic/ ating within it. Allowing polysemy and multivocity—the simultane-

negafiva at stake in the rediscovery of the power of seeing that ity of several meanings and voices—signification splits. And it is

is unfolded in Klee's work. He himself considered this attention to

4 Ibid.: "Denn ihm liget mehr an den formenden Kraften als an den Form-

Enden. Er ist vielleicht ohne es gerade zu wollen Philosoph."

1 F. W. J. Schelling, Initia Philosophiae Universae: Erlanger Vorlesung WS 5 Klee, Das bildnerische Denken, 78: "Die Genesis der 'Schrift' ist ein sehr 1820/21 (Bonn: Bouvier, 1969), 10. gutes Gleichnis der Bewegung."

2 Paul Klee, Form- und Gestaltungslehre 1: Das bildnerische Denken, ed. 6 Following the philological understanding of simile such as that proposed

Jurg Spiller (Basel: Schwabe, 1956), 78: "Bewegung liegt allem Werden by Bruno Snell in his Die Entdeckung des Geistes: Studien zur Entstehung zugrunde." des eu ropaischen denkens bei den Griechen (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck and

3 Klee, "Obersicht und Orientierung auf dem Gebiet der bildnerischen Ruprecht, 2009); in English: The Discovery of the Mind: The Greek Origins

Mittel und ihre raumliche Ordnung," in Das bildnerische Denken, 92: "Ich of European Thought, trans. T. G. Rosenmeyer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

mochte nun die Dimension des Gegenstandlichen in einem neuen Sinne University Press, 1953).

fur sich betrachten und dabei zu zeigen versuchen, wieso der Kunstler 7 Franz Kafka, "On Parables," in Kafka: The Complete Stories and Parables, oft zu einer solchen scheinbar willkurlichen 'Deformation' der naturlichen ed. Nahum N. Glatzer (New York: Schocken Books, 1983), 457. Erscheinungsform kommt." indeed in the "split of significations" that the "incomprehensible" left is in itself the leaving behind of the image, an appearing while

can appear "as" incomprehensible. Thus, the split brought about disappearing or rather the appearing of its own withdrawal. Thus

by the simile turns the gaze to the literality of the movement of when the word draws a line, when it designates, the drawing

one becoming the other. Instead of a world of oppositions and of the line— (the event of an appearing, e.g. the sign)—tends to

comparisons, the simile makes possible a seeing of movement disappear in the drawn line of signification. As much as the writ-

as such, in which one is already the other as being not yet the ing is covered up by the written and the saying by the said, the

other. Because the simile splits signification and makes visible the imaging is covered up by the image. The problem is therefore not

incomprehensible movement of coming (or not) to a signification, so much that words cover up images or that images can cover

it interrupts the attention to writing about birth, focusing rather up words, but the covering up itself that takes place within both

on the literal movement of the birth of writing. The birth of writ- the word and the image. The old opposition between word and

ing is the beginning of a line-drawing. In the beginning was the image can be thought of on the one hand as a misunderstanding,

word, in the beginning was the act: here, in the beginning of a but on the other as already an acknowledgment of this enigmatic

line-drawing, word and act coincide. Read literally, "the genesis movement that moves both the word and the image, the move-

[Genes/s] of writing [Scfir/ft]" indicates the instant of creation as ment of showing the moving—the coming-to-word and the coming-

the drawing of a line, an instant that suspends claims of significa- to-image—covering it up with accomplished words and images.

tion. Showing itself by itself, the writing—that is, the line-drawing— More closely thought, this does not have so much to do with the

appears rather as notation. The presence of musical notation in "nature" of the word or with the "nature" of the image or even

Klee's works is neither allusive nor illustrative. It is, on the con- with the "nature" of signification, but rather with the "nature" of

trary, the confirmation of the path of simile, the "split of significa- the line. Before a "from where" and a "to where"—before tight-

8 tion," as Pierre Boulez insisted in his beautiful book about Klee, ropes and bridges—the line is moving movement. To "draw" a

operated by musical notation in which the movement shows itself moving movement is both the only possible and the most impos-

in its own moving appearing as line-drawing. sible. It is the only possible insofar as every life is moving move-

The drawing of a line is the meaning of a drawing. But here, ment and any drawing of lines can only be done from within the

once again, the polysemy, and more specifically the polysemy moving movements of life. But it is also the most impossible insofar

of the expression "drawing a line" shows the split signification of as the drawing of a line will always lag and defer in relation to

making visible the movement in its moving. To draw a line means, the movement of drawing itself. The moving force of Klee's draw-

on the one hand, to set an end and thereby to separate and ings has to do not so much with the vivid suppleness of the move-

distinguish. This is the dominating discursive meaning of a word. ments that appear in front of us but with the drama of a hand

Words draw lines, identify, set distances between things and expe- trying to draw the line while a line is being drawn. It is the drama

riences, un-confusinq them. But to draw a line means further and of drawing the drawing of a line, the search for an image of the

above all the drawing. In the simile "drawing lines/' i, becomes coming to image, a word for the coming to word. In this drama,

indeed possible to see how word and image belong together. In we can find the source of what could be called Klee's poetics.

the beginning, in their "Genesis," word and image involve draw- Klee's poetical titles do not explain the images anymore than his

ing and drawn lines, sharing writing as their element. The English images illustrate the titles. It is the drama of drawing the draw- verb to write is originally the same word as the Swedish att rita, ing, of painting the painting, of showing the showing that can be

that means to draw, both coming from the Old German r/jan, to called both the poetical source and the source of Klee's poetics,

tear and draw. It is the same word as the German RiB and AufRiB, the poetics of a bildnerisches Denken, of a "thinking eye." If a line

the tear and the sketch. Considered from out of their element in is a bridge, the drawing is somehow a suicide, the drawing of a writing, word and image are movements of one toward the other, being drawn and the being drawn in the drawing, as in Suicide

the multidirectional one drawing toward the other, performing in on the Bridge (Selbstmorder auf der Brucke plate If ) (1913; 21).

the movement of drawing the "drama of the last word" about the a line is a tightrope, the drawer is a dancer hovering between

relation between word and image. (See Last Word in the Drama swaying and falling.

[ letztes Wort im Drama], 1938; plate 44.) Some of Klee's drawings are called Eidola, which means, in

The simile of writing and drawing, being the same not being ancient Greek, small images. Their complete titles are "Eidola"

the same, exposes the rarity of the instant in which word and followed by a colon and further by the adverb "erstwhile." One

image are discovered together. Here, to draw a line and to draw of these is Eidola: Erstwhile Philosopher (EIAQAA: weiland

lines coincide. At this instant, what happens is most rare, namely, Philosophj (1940; plate 60).

the drawing of the drawing of a line and thereby the mysteri- Another is Eidola: Erstwhile Cannibal, Man-Eater. If images

ous way the moving "whiling" of a movement is made visible. appear as drawn from a movement, forming a fragmentary whole

It is made visible as comet and as musical phrase: appearing or a singular unity, separated by a colon, the separation indi-

after-while as traces of an erstwhile. It is made visible also as an cates at the same time the way the movement appears as move-

eclipse, appearing in its own disappearing. The drawing of the ment. It appears withdrawing itself. Klee's Eidola shows indeed

drawing of a line makes visible the way in which the image that is and very clearly the drawing of a line and in it the withdrawing

as a way of appearing as movement. Thus in the image emerging

8 Pierre Boulez, Le pays fertile: Paul Klee (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), 101. from drawn lines the erstwhile can only appear after-while. To a long conceptual tradition, relying mainly upon Aristotle, of con- significations, the coming to forms and images—the becoming

ceiving generation (genes/s) or coming to be, either as opposed and appearing—appears in their moving movement as inverted 152 to or as antecedent to corruption [phthoraj or passing away, modes of this detachment. In this sense, it is not a vision in opposi- Klee will counterpoint the plastic and graphic perspective of a tion to a view of forms but a vision in tension with such a view.

coming-to-be while passing away, showing how close he is to "Deformation," as Klee says, means indeed dis-formation, in the

Holderlin's vision of becoming in dissolution as presented in the sense of leaving the form behind for the sake of opening up a

9 essay entitled "Werden in Vergehen." The distinction between space in between where a coming-to-form appears in its moving

the Aristotelian, teleological view of movement and the graphic movement. Deformation means the dis-formed way in which a

or plastic realized by Klee is the distinction between viewing the coming-to-be, an appearing, can appear in its event: it appears

movement from the point of view of what moves or viewing what as the inverted "image" of a leaving behind. In the meanwhile

moves from the perspective of the ongoing movement. At stake of a leaving-behind the form, the image, the word, the becom-

is the distinction between a view focusing on things—words and ing, appears in its event, as neither before nor after form, but

works—and a view focusing on moving movements—on the event precisely while forming. Here there is no why but solely while.

of relations. Insofar as the appearing only appears in tension with

From a teleological perspective, one centered on things and appearances, its seeing is to a certain extent a confusion with

works, on words and images—that is, on formed forms—there also that which is formed and imaged. Confusion is here a word for

corresponds a notion of poetics. It can be called the philosophi- clarity or even, to use a word of Schelling's, for clairvoyance.

cal notion of poetics. It is "philosophical" not simply because its Line-drawing, Graphik, as Klee names the con-fusion of word and

clearest definition is that of Plato who, in a famous passage in image, or notation—to bring this notion to the full extent drawn in

the dialogue Symposium determines poiesis—the Greek word for his poetics— is "multidirectional," "aphoristic-multibranched" (aph-

10 creative becoming—as the "passage from non-being to being." oristisch-vielverzweigte )." Becoming in dissolution expresses the

It can be called philosophical insofar as it relies upon a view tense "while" of the "cosmogenetic moment" of the coming-to-

that aims at grasping the moving of movements in words and form, the drawing of the drawing of a line where the dissolution

images, following movements from what can be seen as what of forms and the absence of forms, the unformed and the formless

remains identical despite the movement. It is a view of movements coincide. Insofar as a coming-to-form cannot be reproduced in

attentive to what is in spite of its movement, a view afraid of a defined images, but solely made visible in the (multidirectional,

dissolution that would depart from the identification of time with aphoristic, and multibranched) tense coincidence between no

corruption. Here, the coming-to-be is envisaged from the point longer and not yet having a form, it can be described neither

of view of what has come to be and hence of what no longer as a previous or provisional form nor as the preparation of a

becomes or passes away. The becoming is seen from the point future form. It is rather a becoming while in dissolution— "scales

of view of what has come into being, the unaccomplished move- of twilights"—the eventful meanwhile of a pure coming-to, disap-

ment is grasped from out of accomplished forms, beginning from pearing while appearing. Its realization demands a rediscovery

destruction. This philosophical meaning of creative becoming, of of the power of seeing in between the formless and the unformed

poiesis, can even be called a natural vision. It is quite "natural" through a continuous practice of learning to un-learn the formed.

to see movement as focusing on what moves. But insofar as, for Klee wrote several teaching notes on the subject of what is

humans, natural vision is inhabited and inherited vision, and is here being called pedagogia negativa, negative pedagogy.

therefore vision from within a second nature, a transformation Some of these notes, written for courses held in 1921-22

of this natural view on the "nature" of movement demands not at the Bauhaus, were published under the title Pedagogical

2 merely a transformation of vision but the hard and patient learn- Sketchbook.' The title of "sketch" seems to suit the preparatory,

ing to un-learn habits of seeing, a pedagogia negativa of the provisional, and unfinished character of these teaching notes.

formed, in order to begin to see beginnings, that is, movements However, a careful reading of these notes makes possible the

in their moving. The tragic character of a vision of the moving realization that "sketch," here, has a totally different meaning.

from within the event or the meanwhile of the moving lies in the Rather than a before-the-image, "sketch" means becoming while

impossibility of seeing the moving in the same frontal way that in dissolution, the name for the making visible of a movement in its

formed forms—which are usually called things or works—can be moving, the name of the drawing of a line-drawing. Its realization

seen. The vision of the movement while moving, the vision of the is a poetics. Considering the sketch as a becoming while in dis-

coming to a form, to an image, to a word, to being, is a tensed solution, appearing while disappearing, the very drawing of the

sight, a vision in deep tension with the viewing of formed forms, drawing of a line, not only the notion of sketch but also the very

imaged images, or defined beings. Only in detaching itself from notion of poetics is transformed. Poetics no longer means either a

the form, leaving behind appearances, words, and beings, pre- "passage from non-being to being" or even "the force revealed

cisely in this tensed distancing from accomplished meanings and

11 Klee, Dos bildnerische Denken, 80.

9 Friedrich Holderlin, "Werden in Vergehen," in Samtliche Werke (Stuttgarter 12 Paul Klee, Padagogisches Skizzenbuch: Bauhausbucher 2, ed. Walter

Holderlin-Ausgabe), ed. Friedrich Beissner (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1957), Gropius and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (Munich: Albert Langen, 1925); in 282-87. English: Pedagogical Sketchbook, ed. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy (New York: 10 Plato, Symposium 205b-c. Fredrik A. Praeger, 1953). ) ,

." 13 in the appearing of nature. ..becoming world It is rather the and worn-out things! And I only have colors

making visible of the moving movements of a coming-to, of the for your afternoon my written and painted realm of in-between and the meanwhile, the interworlds in which thoughts, perhaps many colors, many colorful 153 nature and world, beginnings and endings coincide. Rather than affections and fifty yellows and browns and

a philosophical notion of poetics, Klee inaugurates an eye-think- greens and reds:—but nobody will guess from

ing bilddenkerische notion of poetics, a poetics of becoming this how you looked in your morning, you sud- ( while in dissolution, a poetics of the sketch. den sparks and wonders of my solitude, you,

14 my old, beloved—wicked thoughts !

Nietzsche sees the difficulty in the human will to "catch by our

Klee's poetics of the sketch is a poetics of the drama of image, hand," in concepts and words, what is the pure movement of a

the dramatic way a coming-to-image is made visible. Image is coming-to. What Klee stresses, however, is that it is only in with-

drama because, in the image, the coming-to-image—the moving drawing itself from whatappears that the appearing can be made

movement of an appearing—withdraws itself, this being the only visible as moving movement, beyond teleological concepts and

way in which it can appear in its moving movement. Appearances the viewpoint of a "from-to." The impotence of human thoughts in

are neither illusions nor partial views on reality, as a metaphysi- conceiving the movement in its moving is itself an "image" of the

cal philosophical tradition has usually conceived it. Appearances drama of the image. Art does not reproduce the visible but makes

are the absenting way the appearing appears as such; and it visible the drama of the visible and, in this sense, the drama of the

is thus that it appears as the eclipse, withdrawing itself in what being of human life. Thus, if humans render movements immortal

appears; as comets and musical phrases, erstwhile afterwhile: as by turning them into things and truths, it is because they are them-

rhythm, in other than itself. Nietzsche was very aware of the dif- selves an image: the withdrawal of the moving movement of the

ficulty of thinking the sketching structure of appearing. For, in the appearing.

attempt to grasp the "novelty," the "morning," bird-like and irrup- Insofar as the appearing can only be made visible in tension

tive character of the appearing, thinking turns itself to thoughts with appearances, an abstraction from appearances is required.

and images, to "tired and worn-out things," losing its ungrasp- Abstraction means here a "drawing out of pure plastic relations"

able moving movements, as he says in one of his most beautiful and not merely an "abstraction from natural and objective possi-

." 15 passages: bilities of comparison At stake is not the substitution of natural

and objective images for formal and abstract ones but the mak-

Oh, what are you anyway, my written and ing visible of the making visible—that is, of the sketching struc-

painted thoughts! It was not long ago that ture of an appearing. The question is rather to sojourn in the in-

you were still so colorful, young and mali- between of the unformed and the formless, of the un-imaged and

cious, so full of thorns and secret spices that the imageless. Heidegger recognized the transformative force of

you made me sneeze and laugh—and now? Klee's works precisely in the transformation of the meaning of

You have already lost your novelty, and I am art that is unfolded in this vision of the image as the place in

afraid that some of you are ready to turn into which appearing appears as withdrawing itself. That is why, for

truths: they already look so immortal, so pa- Heidegger, Klee's works are not "images" but "situations," the

thetically decent and upright, so boring! And movement in which human being is brought to the experience

16 was it ever any different? So, what subjects of nothingness becoming space . Indeed, the sojourn in the in-

do we copy out and paint, we mandarins between, in the midst of the unformed and the formless, in the

with Chinese brushes, we immortalizers of meanwhile of a becoming that is made visible in Klee's works, is

things that let themselves be written—what are not the same as trying to overcome the image to reach a state

the only things we can paint? Oh, only ever of pure imagelessness. It is, rather, to be described as a hold-

things that are about to wilt and lose their ing on to the tightrope that separates and unites the unformed

smell! Only ever storms that have exhausted

themselves and are moving off, and feelings 14 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the that are yellowed and late! Only ever birds Future, ed. Rolf-Peter Horstmann, trans. Judith Norman (1886; Cambridge: that have flown and flown astray until they Cambridge University Press, 2002), 177. 15 Klee, Dos bildnerische Denken, 72. are tired and can be caught by hand,—by our 16 FJeidegger had plans to review critically his essay "The Origin of the Work hand! We only immortalize things that can- of Art" (1935-36) after the impact that Klee's works made on him. He

not live and fly for much longer, only tired also planned to write a book on Klee. In connection with these plans he

wrote some notes on Klee, published for the first time by Gunter Seubold,

under the title "Heideggers nachgelassene Klee-Notizen," Heidegger

13 This is the formulation of Mikel Dufrenne in his Le Poetique: Pour une Studies 9 (1993): 5-12. For some comments on Heidegger and Klee,

philosophie non theologique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, see Otto Poggeler, 8 ild und Technik: Heidegger, Klee und die moderne

1973), 242: "Le Poetique designe en premier la puissance qui se revele Kunst (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2002) and Heinrich Wiegand Petzet, Auf

dans I'apparaTtre de la Nature. Mais la nature ne peut apparaTtre qu'en einen Stern zugehen: Begegnungen mit Martin Heidegger 1929 bis 1976

actualisant ses possibles et en devenant Nature naturee: monde." (Frankfurt: Societats, 1983). and the formless, as a hovering at the co-incidence of what is before our eyes. Children, the mad and the primitives "remained

both no longer and not yet image. In Klee's poetics of the sketch faithful"—which for Klee means "discovered again"—the "power 154 space is in-betweeness and time meanwhileness. What defines of seeing" insofar as they discovered once more the coming into the sketch is this spatio-temporality defined as the meanwhile of being of the world as "interworld," Zwischenwelt. The coming-

an in-between, a profound experience of life as hovering and to—the becoming— is a world in between worlds, between the

oscillation. The poetics of the sketch, presented in Klee, is as exterior, perceived world and the interior, sensed world. It is a

17 much as anything a poetics of hovering (Schweben ). But how world in between the already dead and the unborn, the realm

to grasp the hovering, the meanwhile in-betweeness that in Klee's that might or might not, one day, fulfill its promise. It is the realm

works allows for a meaning of the sketch as a becoming while of the making possible of the possible rather then the making

in dissolution? possible of real actualities. The significance of the notion of "inter-

In Souvenirs, recalling his memories of Der Sturm and the world," of a world between the already dead and the unborn is

Bauhaus, the artist Lothar Schreyer, who taught performing arts so decisive to Klee that the words chosen for his epitaph were: "I

at the Bauhaus, narrates Klee's testimony that concerns this mat- cannot be understood at all on this earth. For I live as much with

ter, part of a conversation that took place in his studio. Klee said: the dead as with the unborn. Somewhat closer to the heart of

." 19 creation than usual. But still not nearly close enough

I overstep neither the picture's nor the compo- In between the dead and the unborn is the hovering place of

sition's limits. But I do stretch its content by in- an is-being, the event of existence. In between the formless and

troducing into the picture new subject matter— the unformed is the hovering place of a coming-to-be. Indeed,

or rather, not so much new as barely glimpsed coming-to-be is nothing but the is-being, the eventfulness of a

subject matter. Obviously this subject matter, meanwhile. This, for Klee, is the wisdom of the line. The line is the

like any other, maintains its ties to the natural trace of the being-drawn, that is, of the drawing. A trace is what

world. By natural world I am not referring to shows the presence of an absence. A drawing exposes the with-

nature's appearance (as naturalism would) drawing way in which the line drawing appears. In the outlines

but to the sphere of its possibilities: this content of the after-while appearing of the erstwhile, the drawing makes

produces images of nature's potentiality... I of- visible the sketching structure of the appearing as such.

ten say. ..that worlds have come into being and In the Pedagogical Sketchbook, we can follow some lessons

continuously unfold before our eyes—worlds in the fundamental achievement of the sketch as an un-learning of

which despite their connection to nature are the image. The Sketchbook deals, we could say, with un-learning

not visible to everybody, but may in fact only principal elements of geometry and chronology, the fundamental

be so to children, the mad and the primitives. I sciences of space and time based on a view of movements from

have in mind the realm of the unborn and the the point of view of formed forms, that is, of things. The inherited

already dead which one day might fulfill its misunderstanding of movement as the relation between a before

promise, but which then again might not—an and an after, presupposes the misunderstanding of the before

intermediate world, an interworld. To my eyes, and the after as separated lines and dimensions, that can be

at least, an interworld; I name it so because drawn as an "image," in the sense of a static unity separated

I detect its existence between those exterior from the whole. It is a fundamental misunderstanding of the

worlds to which our senses are attuned, while "point" as static geometrical unity that lies at the basis of a teleo-

at the same time I can introject it enough to logical view of movement as a coming from a unity to another,

be able to project it outside of myself as sym- as a cominq from-to. The condition of possibility for defininq the

bol. It is by following this course that children, point geometrically as "that which has no part"- assumes the

the mad, and the primitive peoples have re- point as image and the image as the whole of a unity that cannot

mained faithful to—have discovered again—the be grasped as the sum of parts. For, if it were possible to separate

18 power of seeing . the whole of the image into parts, the part would be the whole

of an image as well. Conceived of as the whole of a unity and

Klee stresses here that what we call things, words, and as the unity of a whole, the image says rather the imaged and

images, are worlds coming into being and unfolding continously thereby the carrying to an end of a forming movement. In this

sense, it is the end of a movement that defines the movement. As

"that which has no part," the point is nothing but a static, neutral 17 In a book not often referred to, Metaphysik des Schwebens: Untersuchung is result zur Geschichte der Asthetik (Pfullingen: Neske, 1985), Walter Schulz, an or "dead" point, and the image nothing but the or death important Schelling scholar, presents the problem of hovering Schweben as ( ) of a movement. Only from that point of view does it become pos- a metaphysical, logical, and aesthetical problem insufficiently investigated

in the tradition and as something that has a fundamental importance for

contemporary philosophy in its struggles with the question of the dissolution 19 Paul Klee, Tagebiicher von Paul Klee, 1898- 1918, ed. Felix Klee (Cologne:

of subjectivity and categorial confusion. M. DuMont Schauberg, 1957), 427: " Diesseitig bin Ich gar nicht fassbar, 18 Lothar Schreyer, Souvenirs: Erinnerungen an Sturm und Bauhaus (Munich: denn Ich wohne grad so gut bei den Toten wie bei den Ungeborenen,

Langen und Muller, 1956), quoted in Felix Klee, ed., Paul Klee: His Life and etwas naher der Schopfung als ublich und noch lange nicht nahe genug."

Work in Documents (New York: George Braziller, 1962), 183-84. 20 Euclid, Elements 1.1. -

sible to describe the movement as a "line" between two points or the sketch as a making visible of the enigmatic spatio-temporality

images of things, obtained when lines are drawn in such way that of the meanwhile in-between. The meanwhile-in-between is the the drawing of lines is not itself made visible. rhythmical and pulsative articulation of a tension of contrary 155 When the drawing of the line is made visible, however, the movements. In the sketch, what is made visible is the being drawn

point appears as "moving force" (Agens in Klee vocabulary) while drawing and thereby the tensional articulation of activity

21 and energy "aphoristic-multibranched," in itself already out and passivity that reveals the gerundive character of the mean- ,

and beyond itself, in itself already other than itself. It is density of while in-between. In the sketch, the "being in the middle of the

energy, circulating around itself the tension between centripetal drawing" becomes intense density. It shows the poetic character

and centrifugal forces. As such, the point is not static unity but of the sketch if by "poetic" we understand an intense degree

ecstasy of differentiation, in itself already the being under way of density, of Dichtung. Klee explains the coincidence of being

of a line that, following a more precise formulation of Klee's, is drawn and drawing in the sketch with the graphic sign for the infi-

." 22 the "first dimension of a point How can one not, thus, see that nite, the Moebius strip in which the active is already the passive

a point is a minimal circle? In this sense, the point is a magical, and the other way around, but in such an extreme and intense

energetic, and dense tension of beginnings, a geomancy, rather way that the one is already the other not being yet another, being

than (or before) a geometry. Appearing after-while as erstwhile, in its presence the absent presencing of the other. The opera-

the point shows the geomancy of the is-being, so easily mistaken tive distinctions proposed by Klee between active, medial and

as non-movement in that it is the concentration of forces. Point is to passive lines and planes, are not static distinction of separated

be understood, here, as a turning-point, as the sudden lightning- images, realms or domains but directions of movement, both con-

flash of the instant in which a coming to existence is grasped fused and coincidental, that show the "multidimensional simulta-

" 23 in its turning-to, a "cosmogenetic moment as Klee calls it. As neity" and medial area of tensions of the movement in its moving.

such, the point can only be, as he says, a non-concept Unbe That may explain why instead of talking about links, which would (

griff] or rather a non-conceptual concept unbegrifflicher imply neatly drawn lines between images and things, perspec- ( 24 Begriff]. Thus, it is at once both coming-to-be and passing- tives and instances, Klee will investigate the ligaments of tensional 25 away (Werc/en und Vergehen }, something that is nothing and a movements. In doing so he accomplishes a kind of conceptual

nothing that is something (Das nichtige Etwas oder das etwaige glissando, in which links are heard and seen as ligaments, pas- 26 Nichts }, an in-between dimensions. This in-between dimensions sages as passing, relativity as relations, geometry and chronol-

called "point" is fundamentally a chaos that cannot be opposed ogy as geomancy and chronogenetics, insofar as the non-opposi-

to order insofar as it is the possibility for distinguishing order from tional sense of difference, the very dynamics of differentiation is

chaos. made visible. The organic meaning of ligament shows the moving

Another meaning of opposition and differentiation breaks in structural movements, either rhythmically, as in a chessboard,

through here, demanding another sense of "image," only pos- or in numerical divisions, and thus the rhythmical alternation and

sible through a long and patient un-learning of the imperative of the numerical sequences are made visible from outside the being

image as formed form and static unity of a whole. Being the start drawn by lines while drawing lines. When the moving movement

of a line, the point is that which appears after-while as erstwhile, of the lines become intensively dense, rhythmic alternations and

reversing in the geomancy of the in-between the order of defini- numerical sequences lose the rigidity of an either-or and of a one-

tions. The line, "the first dimension," is for Klee an energetics, itself after-the-other, appearing as one-toward-the-other, being already 27 generated a universal energetics where active, medial, and the other not yet being the other. Lines become drawing forces, by ,

passive lines are continuous movements of one toward the other. crossing of lines, ligaments of movements. In the intense density

There is no where-from and no where-to, their movements are but of the being-drawn by lines while drawing lines, straight lines and

their movings, abrupt and sudden, lightning-flash, earth-irrupting, measurable angles, outlined entities and separated fields move

air-condensing, and water-springing. The line, teaches Klee in the toward one another, revealing in-between spaces and times. As

Sketchbook, is a "walk for a walk's sake," "moving freely, without this intense density of the being-drawn while drawing, the sketch

." 28 goal It makes visible the movement of the drawing hand that makes visible the symbols of moving movements, of the coming-

is drawn while drawing, showing the illusory nature of the lines to-form, to view, to birth, to words. These symbols are the pendu-

drawn between activity and passivity. Being drawn while draw- lum, the circle, the spiral, the arrow, and the infinite movement of

ing, active passivity and passive activity outline the dimensions of energy (usually called color). They are symbols insofar as they

draw the gaze toward the movement's moving, showing in visible

lines the invisibility of trembling and oscillation, in drawn lines the 21 Klee, Pedagogical Sketchbook, 24ff. in 22 Ibid. hovering of drawing. Klee's waterwheels and watermills show, 23 Ibid., 4. the subtle ligaments of the symbol, the hoverings and oscillations 24 Ibid. of the moving in a movement, one already becoming the other 25 Ibid., 3.

26 Ibid. not yet being the other. The sketch makes visible the in-between 27 See here the insightful comments of Jean-Francois Lyotard in the chapter of a meanwhile—the neither here nor there as much as both here "The Line and the Letter," in Discourse, Figure, trans. Anthony Hudek and and there, the neither before nor after as much as the con-fusion Mary Lydon (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 223-24. 28 Klee, Pedagogical Sketchbook, 16. and co-incidence of before and after—as hovering (Schweben) and oscillation. In Klee's Tightrope Walker (Seiltanzer) (1923;

plate 20), we see how straight lines rather then "breadth-less 156 length" are drawn lines, tensioned and concentrated movements and counter-movements. The walker on a tightrope makes visible

the multidimensional simultaneity of movements involved within

and evolving from out of a drawn line. Horizontality and vertical-

ly are given dimension through scales of the walker's weight.

They appear as paths that cross, oscillating between abysses,

where walking is a being-drawn by the drawing in such a way

that the almost falling to the ground is already heaven not being

yet heaven and the other way around.

The poetics of the sketch is the poetics of a coming-to—frag-

ile and irruptive—that shows the intensity of the ephemeral.

Everywhere, the scales of twilight are made visible, showing

the twilighted sketching structure of appearings, the way they

appear disappearing in their images and words. In Klee's poet-

ics of the sketch we learn to rediscover again the power of see-

ing the dramatic belonging-together of appearing and appear-

ances. We learn to see, unfolding before our eyes, interworlds

in which con-fusion becomes clarity and hovering sharpness. His

poetics reminds us that, between the formless and the unformed,

the already dead and the unborn, unfolds the "dusky valley 29 of men," and if "the origin of all human tragedy" lies in the

"contrast between man's ideological capacity to move at ran-

dom through material and metaphysical spaces and his physical 30 limitations," it is because in Klee's works human existence itself

appears as the image of the sketching structure of an appearing,

a becoming while in dissolution. It shows the drama of the image

as the drama of human existence, the drama of this "dream of a

shadow" as Pindar called the human being:

Creatures of a day! What is a man?

What is he not? A dream of a shadow

Is our mortal being. But when there comes to men

A gleam of splendor given of heaven,

Then rests on them a light of glory

And blessed are their days. 31

A gleam of splendor given of heaven: the poetics of the sketch

by Paul Klee.

29 Paul Klee, Gedichte (Zurich: Arche, 1960); in English: "Two mountains,"

in Some Poems by Paul Klee, trans. Anslem Hollo (Suffolk: Scorpion Press, 1962), 14. 30 Klee, Pedagogical Sketchbook, 54.

31 Pindar, Pythian 8.95-9 7. Damir Barbaric The Look from Beyond: On Paul Klee's View of Art

On the stone slab lying over the grave of Paul Klee is written the following:

I cannot be grasped in the here and now. For I live just as well with the dead as with

the unborn. Somewhat closer to the heart of creation than usual. But far from close enough.

In this set of enigmatic lines—first published in 1920 as Klee's manuscript in the catalogue of his exhibition in

the Galerie Goltz 1 —the artist summarized the essentials of the creative existence allotted to him. Like almost

no other artist, he would reflect throughout his life on the wonder of this extraordinary existence, and he was always making new attempts to thoughtfully uncover its strange peculiarity. This brought him into the

2 noteworthy vicinity of philosophy. In the way that philosophy has, in his opinion, a tendency toward art, so

3 the artist is also "perhaps, without really wanting to be, a philosopher."

How are the lines quoted at the beginning of this essay to be understood? What is the meaning of this

"here and now," whose opposite—viz., the beyond—receives its more precise determination through the

gradual unfolding of the text and, as it were, by a detour? What kind of "living" is meant here, which in con-

trast to the kind familiar to us has absolutely nothing to do with other human beings, but rather lingers in the

realm of the dead and the unborn? How does this strange "living" comport itself toward life and the living?

And what is to be understood here by "creation," which by all appearances points to an entirely peculiar,

other-sided realm extending beyond the entirety of the living?

First it must be emphasized that these lines are neither peripheral, merely intellectual additions by Klee

nor post hoc rhetorical or poetic adornment of his artistic ability. To the contrary, they summarize his most

proper self-understanding of his existence as an artist. As a fifty-three year old he recorded in his diary:

I am armed, I am not here,

I am in the depths, am far away...

I am far away... 4 I glow amidst the dead.

Two years later, in profound self-reflection, engaging in an extensive comparison with his friend Franz Marc

who had died in the war, he again says the same:

My fire is more like that of the dead or of the unborn.... What my art probably lacks,

1 Hans Goltz, ed., "Paul Klee," special issue 2, Der Ararat 1 (May-June 1920): 20.

2 Paul Klee, The Diaries of Paul Klee, 1898-1918, ed. Felix Klee (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964), #1081.

3 Paul Klee, "On Modern Art," (in this volume) 13. 4 Klee, Diaries, #931. 157 10 is a kind of passionate humanity. I don't love deep, inward gaze."

animals and every sort of creature with an With these words, anyone who is even slightly familiar with

158 earthly warmth. I don't descend to them or the work of Paul Klee will immediately think of the famous litho-

raise them to myself. I tend rather to dissolve graph After the Drawing [nach der Zeichnung) from 1919, bet-

into the whole of creation and am then on a ter known as Absorption ( Versunkenheit (plate 41). The words )

footing of brotherliness to my neighbor, to all which Gabriele Munter wrote as a commentary to her painting

things earthly. I possess. The earth-idea gives Man in an Armchair (Paul Klee) (Mann im Sessel [Paul Klee])

way to the world-idea. My love is distant and from 1913 appear to refer more to the self-portrait by Klee than

religious.... Do I radiate warmth? Coolness? to her own painting: "Corporeal existence in the world is aston-

There is no talk of such things when you have ishing, and spirit leads its own life, sunk in the sounds of things

11 got beyond white heat.... In my work I do not and in its own self." The face of the artist appears here—by the

belong to the species, but am a cosmic point way, not essentially different from that in a somewhat later oil

5 of reference. painting—as solidified into a mask in a thoroughly meditative,

inwardly-directed attitude, fully sunk in the looking or rather the

All these expressions continuously circle the strange resi- hearkening of the hidden inner world. The tightly closed eyes

dence of the artist and address him from various sides. Outward receive no sensation from the outside; their open roundness has

from every "here," the artist is enchanted in the deep and the dis- narrowed to a horizontal position and resembles the leaves of a

tance. All human warmth and coolness having been discharged, plant pressed onto one another. The disappearance of the circu- 9

he glows indeed, but his glow is no "white" glow of life, but lar form of the eyes allows the circle of the face to appear all the

rather one "with the dead." He has dissolved into the whole, has more in the entirety of the foreground. The human visaqe appears

in his "distant and religious love" given preference to the world no, only "gripped in o s,range nre.omorphosis end passing over

12 over the earth, in order to then—no longer a human, but rather into nature," but also transforming itself into the encompassing

a cosmic point—dwell in the neighborhood distant to all earthly world as a whole. The pressed mouth, circled by a beard, hints at

6 beings. the earth and its growth, while the hairy half-circle high above the

Dwelling in this way, the artist not ungladly gives himself forehead hints at the celestial circle of the sun, the moon, and the

over to the peculiar and poignant moment where his spirit is stars. The closed eyes no longer engage in the optical percep-

completely clear and knows itself as an end in itself, and where tion of natural objects, but rather turn inward and, presaging and

his thinking is wonderfully broadened: "Early days, things fallen feeling, open themselves to the cosmic whole. With good reason

asleep, hidden things, possibilities, melodies of the past and the is this self-portrait by Klee often seen and interpreted in connec-

future, timeless plans, float by, one after the other, and I feel rich tion with his well-known schema l-You-Earth-World that he would

7 13 under a hoard of gifts and must have hope." In such productive develop later in his essay "Ways of Studying Nature."

moments there prevails in him "an ageless philosophical spirit... To grasp more precisely the place where, in Klee's experi-

who overcomes this world, even if it means leading us into the ence, all true artistic creation has its source, it is worthwhile to

wilderness." Then the artist enjoys "the great privilege" of being linger a bit longer with the statements of Klee already men-

"thoroughly calm, completely naked before himself, not the self tioned and also with several other related ones. According to his

of a day but the whole sum of self, totally a working instrument" Bauhaus colleague Lothar Schreyer, in 1920 he stated the follow-

8 and feels "armed." In the "good moment" of one such "unsplit ing: "I say it often, but it is sometimes not taken seriously enough,

instant," there are "no intellect, no ethics" that rule over him. that worlds have opened and open themselves to us which also

Then he is an "observer above the world or a child in the world's belong to nature, but into which not all humans look.... I mean

totality." All at once he is "pure spirit," having become "still and something like the realm of the unborn and the dead, the realm

solitary." He feels even relieved of time: "How enjoyable is the of what can come, what would like to come, but does not need

impression of timelessness. ..this precise equilibrium of being, this to come, an in-between world. I name it an in-between world

standing still, where there is scarcely a breath. All activity here because I feel it between the worlds externally perceptible to

is merely mechanical, a mirage. The only thing real is the long, our senses, and can inwardly so take it in, that with analogies I

10 Ibid., #1076.

5 Ibid., # 1 008. Cf. "Der eigene Standpunkt," in Paul Klee, Aufsatze, Vortrage, 11 Quoted in Boris Friedewald, Paul Klee: Sein Leben—Seine Kunst (Munich:

Rezensionen und Beitrage zur bildnerischen Formlehre, ed. Gunther Regel Prestel, 2011), 57.

(Leipzig: Reclam, 1955), 59-60. 1 2 Carola Giedion-Welcker, Paul Klee: In Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten

6 In this respect it makes sense when Peter-Klaus Schuster sees Klee and his (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1961), 51.

art as distinguished by an essential paradox, namely, the paradox "of being 13 E.g., Schuster, "Die Welt als Fragment," 15: "The diagram forms

through his art here and at the same time not here. ..of encircling actuality simultaneously a head in which the T and the 'you' form the two eyes,

from its opposite side" (Schuster, "Die Welt als Fragment: Bausteine zum the 'earth' forms the mouth with the circling beard, and the region of the

Universum Klee," in Das Universum Klee, ed. Dieter Scholz and Christina 'cosmic commonality' finally forms the cerebral realm of this circling head

Thomson, exh. cat. [Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2008], 17). of Klee's ideal artistic creator of the world." Cf. Jurgen Glaesemer, "Paul

7 Klee, Diaries, #373. Klee und die deutsche Romantik," in Paul Klee: Leben und Werk, ed. Paul-

8 Ibid., #605. Klee-Stiftung, Kunstmuseum Bern, and Museum of Modern Art, NY, exh.

9 Ibid., #713/714. cat. (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 1987), 20ff. 14 19 can project it toward the outside." Elsewhere he designates this in a destructive element."

place for the most part as "beginning" or "ground": "When is the From these and similar considerations, one can understand

15 spirit at its purest? In the beginning." The human spirit reaching the various types of flight and flying but above all the manifold 159 there and capable of residing there is designated by Klee most stages and degrees of transition from one to the other that Klee

often as "crystal." In the luminous calm of this place fully beyond, continually portrays. Thus, flight can be something like a purely

he hopes to divine the nearness of God and light in itself: panicked, terrified, and (so to speak) horizontal running away

which yearns to be as far away as possible from the banal world

16 A kind of stillness glows toward the bottom. of appearance, but through the constant looking back on the

From the uncertain world to be abandoned remains always bound to and mesmer-

a something shines, ized by it (see Flight [Flucht], 1940; plate 25). It is an essentially

not from here, different flight if it dares to abandon the whole dimension of the

not from me, straight-line plane (Uneven Flight [unebene Flucht], 1939; plate

but from God. 14), and lifts itself vertically from earth-bound creeping, passing

From God! Were it only an echo, over to floating From Gliding to Rising [von Gleiten zu Sfe/gen], (

Were it only God's mirror, 1923; plate 18). The one floating is indeed freed from the earth

Still it would be the nearness of God. and its gravity to the extent that he is already made erect and in

Drops of the deep, his upper body feels the yearning drive to escape, but cannot yet

Light-in-itself. actually fly Hardly Still Walking, Not Yet Flying [geht kaum mehr, (

Whoever slept and caught his breath: fliegt no ch nicht], 1927; plate 15). Even one such as this has not

he... yet brought himself to such a detachedness and weightlessness,

17 found his last end in the beginning. in order to be now "more bird" than a merely earthly creature.

There are still many other, always more challenging levels on the

To begin, the human being is only enchanted when "the heart way to the condition called upon by Klee of freely flying, com-

that beat for this world" is, within him, "mortally wounded." For plete detachedness.

such a human the "today" loses its allegedly fixed closedness; This crystalline condition of the other-sided, extra-temporal,

it splits and becomes "a transition from yesterday." For such a and supernatural perfection, even if it is seldom enough achieved,

human, the forms of the terrifying world of today lie only in ruins; cannot be permanent. The artist must time and again abandon

the "here and now" things are to him "only memories." In order it and once more descend to the earth: "The conversation with

to work himself out of his ruins, he must flee. And he flees. In this nature remains for the artist a conditio sine qua non." For he is

ruined world he lingers "only in memory." But in doing so, as also only the "human, nature itself, and a piece of nature in the 20 a substitute for what is lost and abandoned, his soul becomes space of nature." When necessary, the artist should even force

"crystal clear," he becomes the "crystalline character": "I thought himself to the requisite retreat to nature and the earth: "do not

2 ' I was dying, war and death. But how can I die, I who am crystal? quite leave this world behind." Although the relocation into the

18 I, crystal." extra-temporal is exceedingly enjoyable and productive, and

With this abandonment of the world here and now, every- residing in "this invigorating sea" gives humans the opportunity

thing depends on not getting stuck halfway, and in general this "to consider themselves God for the moment," the "return to the 22 can occur for two reasons. Either one remains generally bound drabness of the workday" remains for him "avoidable." Klee

through an excessively passionate love of life in the world to be did not want there to be any doubt about this point. In his contri-

abandoned—what Klee believed he observed in his childhood bution to the festschrift for Emil Nolde, whom he there designated

friend Haller—or one remains within the desired abandonment as an "ancient soul, earthiness as human out of flesh and blood,"

stuck halfway, which Klee discerned in another friend, Alfred Klee distances himself and his art in the sharpest terms from those

Kubin. artists whom he calls "distant from the earth and earth-fleeingly

For, this friend "yearned for the crystalline, but could not tear abstract." In particular, such ones "sometimes forget that Nolde

himself out of the sticky mud of the world of appearances. His art exists. Not so I, not myself on my farthest flights, from which I am

interprets this world as poison, as breakdown. He has advanced always accustomed to find my way back to the earth, to disen- 23 further than Haller, who is a quarter alive; he is half alive, living gage myself in a regained weightiness."

From everything stated above, it is clear that for Klee neither

the this-sided realm of the earth nor the other-sided being of time- 14 Quoted in Friedewald, Paul Klee, 92. 15 Klee, Diaries, #944.

16 Note the poem that Klee wrote at the bottom of his very small drawing in

191 2, where a stick-man swept away by an irresistible vortex and lamenting 19 Ibid., #958.

the poor is depicted in grotesque lines: "Woe is me under the storm wind 20 Klee, "Wege des Naturstudiums," in Beitrage zur bildnerischen Formlehre,

of eternally fleeing time, / Woe is me in the abandonment all around at 67. the center alone, / Woe is me deep down in the icy ground of madness." 21 Klee, Diaries, #636.

Quoted in Glaesemer, "Klee und die deutsche Romantik," 28. 22 Klee, "Schopferische Konfession," in Beitrage zur bildnerischen Formlehre,

17 Klee, Diaries, #948. 66 .

18 Ibid., #951. 23 Klee, "Emil Nolde," in Beitrage zur bildnerischen Formlehre, 87. ) )

less stillness can alone be considered the proper habitat for the with an objective attitude, worldly orientation, and architectonic

artist. Rather, his residence lies in between, in a sense apart from center of gravity, and a Christianity psyche with a subjective ( 160 the difference between the here and now and the beyond, as his attitude, other-worldly orientation, and musical center of gravity. goal lies in functioning "as an entity, down here, with connections The third is the state of the modest, ignorant, self-taught man, a 30 to what is up there." As an artist it is necessary "to be anchored tiny ego." This state is apart from antiquity and Christianity (and 24 in the cosmos, a stranger here but strong." Oscillating in this romanticism)—whose opposition is, in the question of art, for the

way between the beyond that is only ever momentarily touched, most part coextensive with the opposition of the static and the

31 and the this-sidedness which time and again is to be abandoned, dynamic. Klee seeks the proper third way. He pursues this third

renewed, and occupied, the artist undertakes "a weighty destiny: way both in the continuation of the other-sided tendencies which

to be the hinge between this side and the other side, a hinge at (following Christianity) belong to romantic art, and in the simulta- 25 the border of yesterday and today." neous separation from the same, whereas he tellingly allows the

In this lies the real reason for the never flagging fascination this-sided ethos of classical art to "wait in the distance": "Why try

with the world of the tightrope walker and similar acrobats that to tear oneself violently away from a joyful existence here and

so powerfully affected Klee and prevailed as one of the most now?" 32

commonly appearing themes in his art. This theme is evident in The romanticism that wishes to "repel the Earth utterly" and

the lithograph Tightrope Walker ( Seiltanzer (1923; plate 20) ascends over it in actuality "by the dictate of forces that hover,

but equally so in numerous related works such as Entertainer triumphant over the forces of gravity" is designated by Klee as 33 in April [Gaukler i m April plate and Entertainer "crass and bathetic" romanticism. But his own way leads the ) (1928; 22) 26 Festival Gaukler-fest plate It is sufficiently clear world-fleeing gesture that prevails there upward further still, and ( ) (1932; 23).

from which inner "psychological improvisation" Klee was guided is pushed so far until even its earth-averse pathos itself is sur-

in their production. Balance is extremely difficult to maintain mounted and overcome: "In the end I let these forces that are

in the venture of the in-between world, where over and under inimical to the Earth soar out into the beyond, until they reach the

immediately join and pass into one another, and where the bold point of the grand circulation; that way I pass beyond the style

and confident upsurge can turn at any moment to an inexorable of bathos and compulsion to the kind of romanticism that melts 34 decay and demise. This balance appears to Klee's inner eye as into the universe." With his "new romanticism" he thus wishes 35 a universal image or (more precisely) symbol, the symbol both of to organize the movement "beyond pathos." Only in this way

the difficult and dangerous inner struggle of humans for liberation can he say a complete and decisive farewell to the earth—which, 36 from the gravity pulling toward the earth and binding them to by the way, is "not always so very easy." In this way he also

it, and of the tension-filled equilibrium that is especially arduous achieves (which at first glance appears paradoxical) the unfet-

to maintain between the forces violently set against each other tered distance not only from the earth, but also from the hitherto

in the in-between realm. In this context he speaks in a Bauhaus solely dominant urge to flee from it desperately and at all costs.

lecture of the "tightrope walker with his balancing pole as the In the attitude thus acquired, there is no more negating.

most extreme realization of the symbol of the balance of forces." Through the extreme escalation that has been accomplished,

Balancing, the tightrope walker ponders and weighs the gravity negating has turned into pure affirmation: "One deserts the realm

and, as such, is himself essentially nothing other than "the pair of of the here and now to transfer one's activity into a realm of the 27 scales." In the middle of the great in-between, the artist as the yonder where total affirmation is possible.... The cool romanticism

37 cosmic pair of scales balances and weighs the range of gravity. of this style without pathos is unheard of." Only in this purely

From this self-reflection also arises Klee's positioning of his affirming point—one which stands over the pathos of the negat-

own art within a general historical framework. In his opinion, the ing elevation and over the whole of the world—does Klee find, 28 this-sided and objective art is produced only in a happy world. in fleeting nearness to the creatively divine omnipotence, that

The time of a happy, humanly naive life was antiquity, whose which he had passionately sought: the steadfast "home, where 29 38 after-effects he sensed in part in Rome and above all in Naples. the beginning lies." "The individual, which destructively rises

But in Christianity as well as in its succession in romanticism, the above the general, falls into sin. There exists, however, something

subjective longing for the other-sidedness prevailed. The third higher yet, which stands above the positive and the negative. It is 39 way, and for us today the only one remaining, which Klee obvi- the all-mighty power that contemplates and leads this struggle."

ously sees as his own forthcoming task, still lies in uncertainty: "As This all-affirming omnipotence remains inaccessible to everyone

of now there are three things: a Greco-Roman antiquity physis ( ),

30 Ibid., #430. 24 Klee, Diaries, #421. 31 Klee, "On Modern Art," 13.

25 Ibid., #9 57. 32 Klee, Diaries, #862.

26 On this theme in general: Bernhard Marx, Ba/ancieren im Zwischen: 33 Klee, "On Modern Art," 13.

Zwischenreiche bei Paul Klee (Wurzburg: Konigshausen and Neumann, 34 Ibid. 2007). 35 Klee, Diaries, #941.

27 Paul Klee, Form- und Gestaltungslehre 1 : Das bildnerische Denken, 5th ed., 36 Ibid., #957.

ed.Jurg Spiller (Basel: Schwabe, 1990), 197. 37 Ibid., #951.

28 Klee, Diaries, #951. 38 Ibid., #748.

29 Ibid., #392. 39 Ibid., #112. 52 who wishes to grasp it. Here, the highest exertion of thinking is apparently inescapable "destiny of confinement" dominating also in vain. The yearning entity that is sought remains closed him gradually are abolished. The earth-bound, always tense and 40 and "the light of the intellect dies out pitifully." There remains timidly sincere "self-seeking ego" transforms into a cosmic, freely 53 nothing left but to continually pronounce in different ways this last swinging, "divine ego" whose weightless mobility beyond the and highest entity in an equally high condition of perplexity, for intellect becomes a free creative play: "With the last things, art

41 42 54 example as the "unknown. ..great X," as "a last secret," as the plays an unknowing game and still reaches them!" 43 44 "heart of Creation," or as "the secret key." Klee speaks about To understand more accurately what this creative play in this in his lecture in the following way: the immediate vicinity of the "last secret" actually is, and how

it is performed by Klee in the construction of his artwork, these

The power of the creative cannot be named. general observations should be completed first through the com-

It remains, in the end, secretive. Nonetheless, prehensive presentation of his pedagogical doctrine of art, and

it is not a secret that does not fundamentally second—a still more difficult task—through the detailed interpreta-

shake us. We are ourselves laden with this tion of his oeuvre, which of course here is not possible. Instead,

power in our subtlest parts. We cannot ex- we will add a few suggestive remarks through which the manner

press its essence, but we can come to meet and mode of his creating as well as the peculiar site of this creat-

the source, insofar as it is possible. At any rate ing can be somewhat more precisely determined.

we must reveal this power in its functions how In the cosmic standpoint—what Klee also calls the "standpoint 45 55 it is manifest to ourselves. of totality" —all static of earthly things dissolves in the complete

dynamism. It turns out that both natural beings and works of art,

Perhaps Klee struggled in close proximity to this "infinite under their apparent stability on the surface, are in truth unceas- 46 power" of the creative—which can perhaps be assumed to be ing genesis and perpetual becoming: "The creation lives as gen- 56 behind the always emphatically secretive gate which appears esis beneath the visible surface of the work." The insight that 57 many times in his work—when he invented the reverential designa- "becoming is more important than being" provides full clarity to tion "a secret spark from somewhere which, smoldering, ignites the creating entity about the true mode of being of its residence: 47 the human spirit." "To all that becomes belongs movement, and before the work

This new, cool romanticism, as Klee calls his own artistic cre- is, the work becomes, just as the world, before it was, ...became, 58 ating, does not distinguish itself through any dramatic, world- and furthermore it becomes, before it is in the future (will be)." negating gesture. To it, every dramatic expressivity is alien. For, The artist takes this insight to be the reason he himself becomes its unfettered farewell to the world is so complete that it stands at likewise completely mobile, comporting himself toward all things a distance even from farewell itself: "Abstraction from this world in a free and entirely untethered manner. Through the curved and more as a game, less as a failure of the earthly. Somewhere in spiraled direction of the line and the qualitative consideration 48 between." Not from a lack of seriousness but rather from its of tonality and color, but especially through the individual rhyth- overflowing comes the stroke of playfulness characterizing the art mization of things, he abandons the realm of the numerical and of Klee, which so often is superficially confused with the merely more generally the quantitative and increasingly follows the free, childish and even the infantile. The fixed and calm position that creative intuition. Although in this realm every schematizing gen- struggles continually and in various ways for the preservation of eralization easily becomes a misleading oversimplification, it can 49 the vertical, this position "which is altogether earthbound" with perhaps be said with Glaesemer that the line and in general the all its dignified seriousness, belongs to the human intellect and figurative in Klee remain, as a rule, reserved for the realm of the 59 indeed is its highest peak. Furthermore, it disintegrates in the com- here and now. At the same time, his line is completely free and pletely dynamic cosmic standpoint and retreats before the new lively, moved only out of itself. It playfully sets forth on the sensual and essentially higher attitude "whose gestures are extremely adventure of journeying, curving, and bending, and the reluc- 50 lively, causing the posture to step outside itself." The "dramatic tant return. Regardless of whether it involves the realm of organic

51 art of vertical characters" otherwise characterizing humans, growing things, Little Tree [Baumchen], plate of human ( 1935; 9) his "physical-human dependence" on earthly Jty and ,he constructions City of Cathedrals [ Stadt der Kathedralen], 1927; g (

plate or of purely fantastical primeval living things Group in 66), (

Motion [ bewegte Gruppe plate the figures spring- 40 Klee, "Schopferische Konfession," 65. ], 1930; 24),

41 Klee, "exakte versuche im bereich der kunst," in Beitrage zur bildnerischen ing from this free play of the line function like fleeting, shimmer- Formlehre, 90. ing islands of forms only ever temporarily wrested from the com- 42 Klee, "Schopferische Konfession," 65.

43 Klee, "On Modern Art," 14; Klee, "Emil Nolde," 87.

44 Ibid. 52 Ibid.

45 Klee, Dos bildnerische Denken, 17. 53 Klee, Dianes, #961. 46 Klee, Beitraqe zur bildnerischen Formlehre, 199. 54 Klee, "Schopferische Konfession," 66.

47 Ibid. 55 Klee, "Wege des Naturstudiums," 70. 48 Klee, Diaries, #922. 56 Klee, Diaries, #932.

49 Klee, "On Modern Art," 12. 57 Ibid., #928.

50 Ibid. 58 Klee, Beitrage zur bildnerischen Formlehre, 197. 51 Klee, Beitrage zur bildnerischen Formlehre, 132. 59 Glaesemer, "Klee und die deutsche Romantik," 23. -

pletely amorphous ocean of ceaselessly flowing movement: activity from somewhere back there forward

to the here and now, lending Genesis dura- 162 The line of Klee runs, springs, tumbles, and tion. He goes farther. He says to himself, re- leaves behind in its idiosyncratic paths now stricting himself to this world: Our world once

rigorous geometrical trails, now free signs upon a time looked different, and it will look

reminiscent of botanical curves of growth. In different again. And, leaning toward the Be-

an unceasing rushing onward it seems in ev- yond, he opines: On other stars things may 63 ery instance to adapt itself to the milieu; that is, have assumed very different forms.

it seems to drive its essence into the modified

tempo and the transformed musical key on the Through this longer statement, the conditions are perhaps

earth, in the air, and in the water, in order to provided for understanding the programmatic sentence with

transform everything from static being into an which Klee begins the essay that became famous under the title 60 active becoming. "Schopferische Konfession": "Art does not reproduce the visible,

but rather makes visible" (To Make Visible [sichtbar machen ],

Following on the line and drawing, especially when it unfolds 1926; plate 59). Klee's art does not settle for the representing

further into the spiral indicating infinity, the colors pregnant with reproduction of the optical impressions of natural earthly things.

quality and the geometrically formed, strongly rhythmized images To the contrary, its ambition lies in the "making visible of unopti- 64 of squares in Klee appear to be the expression of an attitude cal impressions and representations." Klee explains what this

more other-sided-oriented and already merging with music. The means in the most detailed manner in the already mentioned brief

transitional and in-between stages from one realm to another are yet methodologically crucial essay "Wege des Naturstudiums":

indicated through non-representational image-signals such as the The artist who knows himself indeed as a creation on the earth

arrow, the circle, and the half-circle Geometric Spiral geome but furthermore as a "creature within the whole, i.e., a creature on ( [

trische Spirale ], 1927; plate 27 and Scherzo with Thirteen [Das a star under stars" performs first on the "optical way" an intuitive

Scherzo m it der Dreizehn ], 1922; plate 37). "escalation of the expression of appearance" of external objects;

This growing dynamization also brings the artist to the realiza- he abolishes their earth-bound architectonic stasis and, through

tion that calmness on the earth is only a "contingent inhibition of his creating, brings them into a floating framework of "functional

61 matter." The consistent functionality or rather the relativity of all internalization." On the dynamic ground laid as a result, he

visible things declares itself: "Previously one depicted the things makes the decisive step forward consisting in the "humanization

which were to be seen on the earth, which one enjoyed seeing or of the object," i.e., of the elucidation of the "relation of resonance

having seen. Now the relativity of visible things is made manifest, of the self to the object." His eyes cease to be a mere "seeing"

and in so doing imparts expression to the belief that in relation to and become "feeling." In a "synthesis of external seeing and

the world as a whole, the visible is only an isolated example, and inner looking," two additional "not optical" ways open up before 62 that other truths are latent within the majority." Only now does the artist. In the first of these "metaphysical" ways, the "shared

the artist himself become mobile and thereby also free for the earthly rootedness" of both the object and the feeling artist are

entirely altered goal of his art. "He does not grant.. .compelling brought to exhibition (as it were) from below, and in the second 65 significance" to the natural forms of appearing: way their "cosmic commonality" is revealed from above.

Relieved of the gravity of the earth and of the attendant con-

He does not feel so bound by these realities, finement of merely human life, the artist in the creatively playful

because he does not see in these culminating wandering measures in all three ways the great "in-between" of

forms the essence of the creative process of the earthly here and now and the cosmic beyond. Only in this

nature.... Hence he descries the things formed way can he preserve his creative nearness to the infinite moved-

by nature that pass before his eyes, examines ness of the divine ground, the divine beginning. The results of his

them with a penetrating look. The more deep- art run parallel to those of nature. For, no less than those natural

ly he gazes, the easier it is for him to connect ones, they are merely an example of infinite divine creation, in

today's points of view with those of yester- which everything already past and everything future is equally

year. What imprints itself on him, rather than available as the perpetual present. Not least of all, the much-

the finished natural image, is the image of discussed basic symbol of the arrow so prominent in Klee serves

Creation as Genesis, for him the sole essential to make every static condition both temporally and spatially

image. He then allows himself the thought that dynamic, and to combine them through its tension-filled direction

the Creation can scarcely have come to stop with the other equally dynamized conditions. The arrow is the

today, so that he extends the world-creating dynamized factor par excellence; it refers not only to movement

60 Giedion-Welcker, Paul Klee, 131. 63 Klee, "On Modern Art," 13. 61 Klee, "Schopferische Konfession," 63. 64 Klee, "Wege des Naturstudiums," 69.

62 Ibid. 65 Ibid., 68-69. ]

but also to the initial originating impulse to an actual movement. as such, that is to say, those today who "achieve some sort of

In this respect it also functions in the work of Klee as a symbol for proximity to that secret ground by which the primordial law nour- 66 thoughts and for the will. Directed upward, the arrow can sig- ishes every development. There where the central organ of all 163 nalize yearning elevation and liberation, and falling downward, temporal-spatial animatedness, whether we call it the brain or by contrast, danger and destruction. When leading the way side- the heart of Creation, occasions all the functions: who as an artist ways, it indicates extension and free opening, sideways trans- would not want to dwell there? In the womb of nature, in the pri- ferring and assigning the mostly hidden presence of the future mal ground of Creation, which holds the secret key to everything 70 and the past into the tension-filled and nearly-fissured present. In that is?"

Klee, not only time but also space is moved, thoroughly dynamic, laden with tension. As with every "now," "then," "formerly," and Translated from the German by Jon K. Burmeister, Boston College

"once," in Klee every "here" and "there" are fully relative, penetrated by one another and finally joining together into a continually changing unity of all, in which "there is no more Above and no more Below, no Horizontal and no layering of the depths, rather only a many-sided hovering in an Everywhere of relations 67 of stone, star, tree, and mountain, of earthly and heavenly."

Klee was well aware of this disconcerting peculiarity of his art, and in his lectures he did not hesitate to express it in a radical manner: "No Here, no There, only an Everywhere. No Long-Short, only an Everywhere. No Distant-Near, no Today, Yesterday, Tomorrow, only a Tomorrow-Yesterday." 68 Many of his images lack an unambiguous orientation with respect to above and below; many can be, indeed even should be, reproduced upside down. What is presented often does not dwell on the edge of the image, but rather appears to want to push itself outward and beyond. Often in an image everything presented moves from all sides in toward the middle of the image, everything grows and at the same time falls toward the middle, spellbound, as it were, and irresistibly attracted (see [Compos/f/on with Symbols [ Composition m it Symbolen], 1917, plate 11; N.

H. D [Province En-Aitch-Dee] [N. H. D. (provinz enhade j], 1932, plate 64; Insects [/nsecfen], 1919, plate 3; The Scales of Twilight

[Die Waage der Dammerung ], 1921, plate 5; and Printed Sheet with Pictures [ Bilderbogen ], 1937, plate 36).

Few artists sustain this creative-playful wandering in-between. Many remain stuck on the way there and thus prove themselves to be simply presumptuous. Sometimes they allow the freedom of their inexhaustible liveliness to suffocate under the self-selected burden of the unquestioningly adopted thousand-year-old construction of ideological dogmas and value systems Death for ( the Idea [Der Tod fur die Idee], 1915; plate 61). Sometimes they even abandon this freedom when after a long ascent they need to make only one more step to the peak and, having lost the courage and the power to balance any further, out of fear and panic they throw themselves down Suicide on the Bridge (

[ Selbstmorder aufder Brucke], 1913; plate 21 ). As Klee was said to have stated in a conversation: "Few push to the ground and 69 begin to build." But only these should be seen as truly "called"

66 Ann Temkin, "Klee und die Avantgarde, 1912-1940," in Klee: Leben und Werk, 67.

67 Carola Giedion-Welcker, "Blumenmythos," in Paul Klee: Im Zwischenreich; Aquarelle und Zeichnungen von Paul Klee (Cologne: M. DuMont Schauberg, 1957), 62. 68 Paul Klee, Form- und Gestaltungslehre 2: Unendliche Naturgeschichte, ed. Jurg Spiller (Basel: Schwabe, 1970), 13. 69 Ludwig Grote, ed., Erinnerungen an Paul Klee (Munich: Prestel, 1959), 91. 70 Klee, "On Modern Art," 14.

Jeffery Howe Paul Klee and the Unseen World: Ghosts, Somnambulists, and Witches

Haunting questions of fate and destiny frequently appear in Paul Klee's art. Although he worked on a

small scale, he dealt with ultimate questions of life and death. An intriguing paradox is that although Klee

was supremely rational, he was clearly interested in occult themes, if only as a symbol for spiritual under-

standing. A casual examination of his complete works reveals over three hundred images of ghosts and

the related themes of the occult. 1 These provided Klee with a rich metaphor for the creative process, and

subjects that lent themselves to allegorical presentation of themes from psychology, the natural sciences,

and social criticism. Allegory was present in his earliest works, and became even more useful in an increas-

ingly repressive environment. Klee had a gift for creating emblematic images, both verbal and visual. In the

early 1920s he wrote: "Man is half a prisoner, half borne on wings. Each of the two halves perceives the

2 tragedy of its halfness by awareness of its counterpart." The pathos of heroism and tragedy informs Klee's

works from his early etching The Hero with the Wing ( Der Held m it dem Flugelj (1905) to his last paint-

ings. Although Klee was often simplified as a naive, even irrational artist, he was immensely analytical and

3 methodical in his construction of images and meanings. This did not rule out playfulness, however, and he

maintained a love of fantasy and intuition.

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries brought a wide interest in the occult and mysticism, from

popular interest in astrology and hypnotism to theosophy, spiritualism, and magic. Traditional folk tales of

ghosts and nature spirits continued to thrive as well, such as stories of the mountain spirits of the Swiss Alps

and witches in the forests and mountains of Germany. Klee made many paintings and drawings of earth

4 and air spirits. Although he was far too rational and ironic to believe in these superstitions, the traditional

legends provided a useful metaphor for physical forces that could be given pictorial form.

Modern art, especially expressionism, was popularly associated with mysticism in the early twentieth

5 century, and scholars have unraveled some of these complex connections. The new religion of theoso-

phy found many adherents. Theosophy literally means knowledge of God, and modern theosophy was

1 Josef Helfenstein and Christian Rumelin, eds., Paul Klee: Catalogue Raisonne, 9 vols. (London/New York: Thames and Hudson,

1998-2004). Klee kept thorough records of his production, and he numbered his works within each year.

2 Paul Klee, Notebooks, Volume I : The Thinking Eye, ed. Jurg Spiller, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: George Wittenborn,

1961 ), 407. See also Stephen H. Watson, "Gadamer, Benjamin, Aesthetic Modernism, and the Rehabilitation of Allegory: The

Relevance of Klee," in Crescent Moon over the Rational: Philosophical Interpretations of Paul Klee (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 35-58.

3 See Bettina Gockel, "Paul Klee's Picture-Making and Persona: Tools for Making Invisible Realities Visible," Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 39 (2008): 418-33.

4 Some of these works include: Swamp Water Sprite ( Sumpfwasser nixe ( 1 Storm Ghost ( Sturmgeist ( 1 Earth Devil Erd ) 924); ) 925); (

Teufel Sea Phantom See-Gespenst Storm Spirits Sfurm-Geisfer and Earth Spirits ( Erdgeister ) (1930); ( ) (1933); ( ) (1933); ) (1938).

5 See Maurice Tuchman, Judi Freeman, and Corel Blotkamp, eds., The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890- 1985 (New York:

Abbeville Press, 1986). Also, Veit Loers et al., eds., Okkultismus und Avantgarde: Von Munch bis Mondrian, 1900- 1915, exh.

cat. (Frankfurt: Edition Tertium/Schirn Kunsthalle, 1995). One of the first to deal seriously with this matter was Sixten Ringbom,

"Art in 'The Epoch of the Great Spiritual': Occult Elements in the Early Theory of Abstract Painting," Journal of the Warburg and

Courtauld Institutes 29 (1966): 386-418. Also Sixten Ringbom, The Sounding Cosmos: A Study in the Spiritualism of Kandinsky and the Genesis of Abstract Painting (Abo: Abo Akademi, 1970). 165 )

founded in 1875 by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831 -91 166 and Col. Henry Steel Olcott (1832-1907). It was a syn-

cretic blend of various mystic

traditions, with an overlay

of the evolutionary theories

of Charles Darwin. Artists such as Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc,6 both close

friends of Klee, were drawn

to theosophy early in their

careers. Kandinsky's mani-

festo Concerning the Spiritual

in Art (1912) justified abstract

art as a powerful vehicle for revealing and encouraging

spiritual insight. By this date, however, Kandinsky seems

to have been moving away

from earlier interests in theoso- 10

phy toward a more personal Fig. 1 : Paul Klee ( 1 879- 1 940), Lump Spirits, Wisp Spirits and Light Spirits (the Last Very Fragmentary) Klumpgeister Wischgeister u Lichtgeister [letztere sehr fragmentarisch]), 1908/13. Pencil on paper on spiritual belief. Klee's own ( , cardboard, 14.5 x 21.2 cm, Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern. attitude toward mysticism is

generally ironic and skeptical,

even scornful/ He expressed deep doubts about the theosophy Klee was intrigued with topics in which he could not whole-

8 of Rudolph Steiner in his diaries. Steiner was a leading Swiss heartedly believe, yet found useful for satire and as serious meta-

mystic who founded the Goetheanum, a center for the study of phors for the creative process. Not only his friends Marc and

anthroposophy, an outgrowth of his earlier involvement in the- Kandinsky, but his own wife Lily, was keenly interested in astrol-

11 osophy, at Dornach, Switzerland in 1914. Klee denied any con- ogy and theosophy. Occultism and spiritualism provided a new

nection to theosophy in a 1919 letter to Oskar Schlemmer: "With and potentially liberating perspective on religion and health for

9 12 theosophy I have never concerned myself." Nonetheless, Klee many.

was denied a teaching post in Stuttgart in 1919 in part because Klee possessed a vivid imagination, a gift that had marked his

of suspicions that he was a Jew and theosophist. earliest years. In his diary he recalls very early memories of see-

ing images from his drawings come to life: "Evil spirits that I had

6 Kenneth Lindsay and Peter Vergo, eds., Kandinsky: Complete Writings drawn (three to four years) suddenly acquired real presence. on Art (New York: Da Capo Press, 1994), 117. For Franz Marc's links to I ran to my mother for protection and complained to her that theosophy, see John F. Moffitt, "Fighting Forms: The Fate of the Animals. The 13 little devils in the (four years)." Occultist Origins of Franz Marc's 'Farbentheorie,'"Arfiibus et Historiae 6, had peeked through window

no. 12 (1985): 107-126. As a child, the shapes that Klee drew seemed to come to life 7 Marcel Franciscono notes, "Nor does Klee ever refer to the literature of and escape from their paper world. He continued to create new the mystical tradition except with scorn, such as he directed against Rudolf

Steiner's theosophy in 1917-18." See Marcel Franciscono, Paul Klee: His worlds through his art, long after he had grown out of his child-

Work and Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991 ), 3.

8 Paul Klee, The Diaries of Paul Klee, 1898- 191 8, ed. Felix Klee (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1964), #1088: "Theosophy? What makes position came from Stuttgart. In June 1919 he was proposed by a student

me particularly suspicious is the description of the visions of color. Even if no committee of the Stuttgart Academy headed by Oskar Schlemmer to

fraud is involved, one is self-deceived. The coloration is unsatisfactory, and replace Adolf Holzel, who had resigned his professorship. But the academy

the allusions to formal composition are downright comical. The numbers are refused him on the ground that he was too 'dreamy' and 'feminine' an artist,

impossible. The simplest equation has more meaning. The psychological a decision supported by the local press, in one instance with particular

aspect of the 'schooling' is suspicious too. The instrument is suggestion. nastiness. Not only was his art dismissed—hardly a surprise to him, one

But truth does not require a lack of resistance in order to impose itself. would imagine—but he was accused of being a Jew and a theosophist,

Naturally I read only part of the book, because its commonplaces soon the last evidently being the worst that could be said against him. After this

made it unpalatable to me." rejection by Stuttgart, with its ad hominem component, Klee must have

9 From a letter to Schlemmer (in the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart Oskar Schlemmer welcomed his Bauhaus invitation all the more."

Archive) quoted in Karin von Maur, Oskar Schlemmer und die Stuttgarter 1 1 Sabine Rewald, citing Felix Klee in Paul Klee: The Berggruen Klee Collection

Avantgarde 1919 (Stuttgart: Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Kunste in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: FJarry N. Abrams, 1988),

Stuttgart, 1975), 11, quoted in O. K. Werckmeister, The Making of Paul 191. Klee's 1914-1920 (Chicago: University of Press, 12 Wolffram, The Stepchildren of Science: Psychical Research Career, Chicago 1989), Heather and

216. Werckmeister quotes the original German: "Mit Theosophie habe ich Parapsychology in Germany, c. 1870-1939 (New York: Editions Rodopi, mich nie beschaftigt." 2009), 50, 64.

10 Franciscono, Paul Klee, 242: "Klee's first real prospects for a teaching 13 Klee, Diaries, #10. ,

hood fear of devils.

Although resemblance can be seen as forging a kind of magi-

14 cal identity with the subject depicted, Klee left straightforward 167 realism behind after his student days. He famously declared in

his "Creative Credo" that the role of art was to create, not imitate: "Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible"

]S ( Kunst gibt nicht das Sichtbare wieder, sondern macht sichtbar).

The age-old criticism of painting as mere imitation of the visible world, copying without thought, is refuted here by Klee. He fur-

ther declared that his artistic vocation made him something of

a medium, linking this world with a spiritual realm: "I cannot be

understood at all on this earth. For I live as much with the dead

as with the unborn. Somewhat closer to the heart of creation than

usual. But not nearly close enough." 16 Parallels between the cre-

ative process and the goal of mysticism, to extract deeper mean-

ing from the superficial appearances of life, appear again and

again in Klee's art.

GHOSTS

Echoes of the past and future are often found in Klee's art;

earthly and spiritual planes intersect and are revealed by the

clairvoyant artist. An early drawing, such as Lump Spirits, Wisp

Spirits and Light Spirits (the Last Very Fragmentary) Klumpgeister (

[letztere Wischgeister u Lichtgeister sehr fragmentarisch]) ( 1908;

fig. 1 ), shows the faint hovering forms of spirits of the earth and

air. The wiggly drawing style here is reminiscent of James Ensor,

the Belgian symbolist and expressionist artist, whose works Klee

17 discovered in 1907 through his friend Ernest Sonderegger.

Ensor's 1888 etching Witches in a Windstorm rather closely

resembles Klee's drawing. Klee noted his admiration for Ensor in Fig. 2: Paul Klee, Mr. Death ( Herr Tod), 1916. Plaster, wood, and cloth, 18 his diaries. The artist's satirical bent and emphasis on drawing 48 cm, Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern.

paralleled Klee's own predilections at that time. Tubby, wrinkly

"lump spirits" cavort on the ground level, while wispy spirits float critic Eckcart von Sydow described Klee as a clairvoyant whose

overhead in Klee's humorous drawing. works impressed another occultist:

Klee's images of ghosts often have a comic aspect, with spirits

found in unexpected settings, as in his 1915 drawing Spook in He listens, quite motionlessly, to the inner

the Butcher's Shop ( Spuck in der Metzg (plate As immate- voice which becomes audible within him; as if ) 28).

rial spirits, food should be the last thing that ghosts would want, trembling, this voice whispers: "Take the most

and indeed one of the abstract figures raises his arms and recoils sharp-ended pencil in your hand and the ten-

from the animal on the table. The animal, humans, and even the derest brushes, do not move, but wait, wait,

table are drawn with similar shapes, suggesting their underly- until your hand moves by itself."...

ing kinship. Klee's drawing style is now much simpler and more

abstract, using flattened two-dimensional shapes that look more ...And his eyes tell of mystical practices— how

mechanical than organic. Their stiff movements remind one of often he must have attempted to aim his glance

marionettes, controlled by unseen forces. at the other side of the moon: thus looks only

Klee's depictions of ghosts resonated with contemporary a man who has won the subtlest knowledge

occultists, who tried to claim kinship with him. In 1919 the art from abnegation....

...Does Klee consciously concentrate that 14 Michael Cole, "The Demonic Arts and the Origin of the Medium," Art way? He probably renders the inner states of Bulletin 84, no. 4 (Dec. 2002): 621 -40.

15 Klee, "Creative Credo," in The Thinking Eye, 76-80. his soul as a copy-faithful imitator. And also

16 Quoted in Franciscono, Paul Klee, 5. the state of [transcendental] realities? Prob- 17 Charles Werner Haxthausen, Paul Klee: The Formative Years (New York: ably; for a clairvoyant who saw the drawing Garland, 1981), 222. 18 Klee, Diaries, #798. Souls of the Deceased Approach a Table Set The theme of deception implicit in this theater reminds one of

Francisco Goya's Here Comes the Bogeyman, from his graphic 168 series Los Caprichos of 1799 in which a man dresses in a sheet to impersonate a ghost in order to frighten small children (fig. 3).

Puppets, which perform as surrogate actors, are whimsical and

ominous, as if a part of one's body started to act independently.

On one level, Klee and Goya used themes of ghosts to satirize

the credulity of people. There may be more to these comic fig-

ures, however. Marcel Franciscono highlights the daemonic qual-

ity of these puppets: "As Klee conceives his puppets they are

often closer to magical beings—daemons or demiurges—than to

human beings. Puppet and daemon for Klee have in common

that they are both under the control of higher forces, the vessels 20 of wills not their own." Themes of freedom and creative inde-

pendence were often expressed metaphorically by Klee. 21 The

intimate scale of these puppets, and their use with children, shows

him breaking down the barriers between the fine arts and crafts.

SPIRITUALISM AND SOMNAMBULISM Ghosts represent the survival of the human personality after

death. They appear frequently in literature from biblical times

through Shakespeare, and are a staple of romantic writing and

art. Contact with ghosts in earlier history was generally a one-

way street, with the ghosts appearing to pass on a message to

living mortals or to take revenge on them. Dialogue with spirits

took on a new interactive form after 1848, however. After the

Fox sisters in upstate New York demonstrated an alleged means Fig. 3: Francisco Goya (1746-1828), Here Comes the Bogeyman of communicating with the spirits of the dead through loud rap- [Que viene el Coco), pi. 3, Los Caprichos, 1799. Etching and aquatint, 21 .5 x 15 cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, Gift of M. ping signals in 1848, the floodgates opened for many imitators 22 Knoedlerand Co., 18.64(3). to follow with their own versions of spiritual telegraphy. These

became increasingly elaborate, with so-called mediums not just

with Food exclaimed in astonishment: "That is translating messages coded in table rappings, but actually bring-

exactly how I see these beings!" Is it a general ing forth physical manifestations, including solid objects and

human state of fantasy? Are supernatural phe- material from the spirit world, in the form of ectoplasm. The most

19 nomena really perceivable to certain men? ambitious mediums actually brought forth full size images of the

deceased in ghostly form. Unfortunately, these manifestations of

Spook in the Butcher's Shop may have been the drawing that sur- ectoplasm were generally bits of cotton coughed up from the

prised von Sydow's clairvoyant. Klee later returned to this theme mediums' throats, and the simulacra of the deceased were found

in ( in a painting entitled Starving Spirits hungernde Geister ) (1934; to be imposters swathed gauze and coated with white make-

fig. 12), discussed below. Klee's titles use a variety of synonyms up. Despite the many exposures of phony mediums, the practice

for spirit beings, including spirit (Ge/sf), spook [Spuck), phantom continued to attract believers until well into the twentieth century.

[Phantom), and ghost Gespenst ). Each implies slightly different For many, the yearning for comfort and continued contact with ( a

shade of meaning. the lost loved ones overshadowed their doubts. The literature on

23 Among Klee's more engaging images of ghosts are some spiritualism is vast, reflecting its popular appeal then and now.

of the hand puppets he made for his young son, Felix (fig. 2).

These were used to enact tales of fantasy and imagination that 20 Franciscono, Paul Klee, 193. 21 Stephen H. Watson, "To Sketch an Essence: Schematic Thoughts on Paul he performed on a miniature stage. The hand is the tool for Klee and the Image of the Daemonic," Research in Phenomenology 41 metamorphosis and creativity, and takes on an active role in (2011): 253-75. these small puppets, controlled by, but seemingly independent 22 Ruth Brandon, The Spiritualists (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1984). Spiritualism was particularly strong in America. See Charles Colbert, of the puppet-master when the viewer suspends their disbelief. Haunted Visions: Spiritualism and American Art (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).

23 Some notable examples of the spiritualist literature include: F. W. H. Myers,

19 Eckcart von Sydow in Munchner Blatter 1, no. 6 (1919) reprinted in his Die Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death (London: Longman,

deutsche expressionistische Kultur und Malerei (Berlin: Im Furche, 1920), 1903); L. Moutin, Le magnetisme humain: L'Hypnotisme et le spiritualisme

124-26. Quoted in Werckmeister, The Making of Paul Klee's Career, 199. moderne, consideres aux points de vue theorique et pratique (Paris: Perrin, "

Noted intellectuals defended

this movement, including the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer,

who argued that it was a real phenomenon, but based on

idealist constructs in the mind

of the medium, not the real-

ity of ghosts, in his "Essay on 24 Spirit Seeing." One of the

major figures in German spiri-

tualism was Justinus Kerner, whose most famous work was

The Seeress of Prevorst ( Der

Seherin von Prevorst 25 ) (1829). Kerner was a doctor and also

an amateur artist who experi-

mented with abstract compo-

sitions based on ink-blots that Fig. 4: Paul Klee, Spiritualist Catastrophe (Spiritistische Katastrophe), 1916/32. Pen on paper on cardboard, anticipated surrealist automa- 7.4 x 15.7 cm, Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern.

tism and the ink-blots of the

Swiss doctor Hermann Rorschach, which were published in his Kubin in 1919 he wrote: "The hard times have strongly influenced 26 book Psychodiagnostik in 192 1. Other noted German research- my art in an ethical sense. There has been a complete break- 29 ers of psychic phenomena included Carl du Prel and Eduard von through of the religious." 27 Hartmann. What Klee meant by this is controversial; O. K. Werckmeister

Klee's drawing Spiritualist Catastrophe ( Spiritistische vigorously denied that Klee meant that he had become reli-

linked to tragic of (fig. His in sense: "Still, Katastrophe ) has been events 1916 4). gious a conventional Klee cannot possibly have

own diaries point to the connection: "A fateful year. At the end of meant to say that as a result he had become religious. Rather,

January, Louis Moilliet's wife died while giving birth to a son, her he was alluding to a newly emerging turn toward the religious

first child. On March 4 my friend Franz Marc fell at Verdun. On in his work, whereby he was linking up with a general tendency 35. 28 30 March 1 1 I was drafted at the age of At the center of the in the modernist German art world." Marcel Franciscono con-

drawing, a shocked head is linked to the body of a small figure, tests this view, however: "In dismissing Klee's 'turn to religion' in

most likely a child. Moilliet was a close friend and fellow artist 1918 as a despondent reaction to his faltering sales of the time, who had traveled to North Africa with him. At right a fallen figure Werckmeister ignores a fact to which his diaries and his letters

may represent Franz Marc. The enigmatic number twenty-seven both attest, that he had been occupied with religious questions

31 hovers above him. Marc (February 8, 1880-March 4, 1916) since his youth." was killed before his twenty-seventh birthday. At left, three figures

(or perhaps two figures and a mirror) look on. The tragedies of

life and the war could not but affect Klee. In a letter to Alfred SPIRITUALISM IN MUNICH

Munich, where Klee attended art school and first established

his career, was a cosmopolitan city with both an active interna- 1907); Frank Podmore, The Newer Spiritualism (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 32 1910); and Arthur Conan Doyle, The History of Spiritualism, 2 vols. (New tional art scene and leading psychic researchers. Baron Alfred

York: George FI. Doran, 1926). Myers founded the Society for Psychical - von Schrenck-Notzing ( 1 862 1 929) was one of the pre-eminent Research in London in 1881. A recent exhibition at the Metropolitan German researchers of spiritualism in the early twentieth centu- Museum of Art featured spirit photography; see: Clement Cheroux et 33 al., The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult (New Haven: Yale ry. A trained psychotherapist, he began researching hypnotism

University Press, 2005). and telepathy in the late nineteenth century. In the early twentieth 24 Arthur Schopenhauer, "Essay on Spirit Seeing," in Parerga and century, he became fascinated with so-called "physical medi- Paralipomena: Short Philosophical Essays, trans. E. F. J. Payne, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974), 225-310. See especially 229, 285, and 292.

Schopenhauer argues that the image of the deceased is not a real ghost,

but an image eidolon of the deceased, in the mind of the seer. 29 Quoted in Werckmeister, The Makinq of Paul Klee's Career, 111. ( )

25 Justinus Kerner, The Seeress of Prevorst [Der Seherin von Prevorst], trans. 30 Ibid. Catherine Crowe (New York: Partridge and Brittan, 1855). 31 Marcel Franciscono, review of The Making of Paul Klee's Career, 7974-

26 Hermann Rorschach, Psyschodiagnostilc (Bern: H. Huber, 1998). See also 7920 by O. K. Werckmeister, Art Bulletin 73, no. 4 (Dec. 1 991 ): 698.

Bernard Harper Friedman, "Hermann Rorschach as Artist," Arts Magazine 32 Corinna Treitel, A Science for the Soul: Occultism and the Genesis of the 53, no. 8 (Apr. 1979): 128-34. German Modern (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), esp.

27 Carl du Prel, Philosophy of Mysticism (London: George Redway, 1889). 110-18.

Eduard von Hartmann, Philosophy of the Unconscious, trans. N. C. 33 Eberhard Bauer, "Spiritismus und Okkultismus," in Loers et al., Okkultismus Coupland (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1950). und Avantgarde, 60-80. See also Veit Loers and Pia Witzmann,

28 Klee, Dianes, #965. "Munchens okkultistische Netzwerk," in the same volume, 238-43. everybody can see into although they too are

a part of nature. Perhaps it's really true that 170 only children, madmen and savages see into

them. I mean, for example, the realm of the

unborn and the dead, the realm of what can

be, might be, but need not necessarily be. An

in-between world. I call it that because I feel

that it exists between the worlds our senses

can perceive, and I absorb it inwardly to the

extent that I can project it outwardly in sym-

bolic correspondences. 36

The artist mediates between the realm of ordinary consciousness

and this higher reality, using symbolic forms to communicate his

vision. This search for correspondences between heaven and

earth is rooted in the celestial arcana of the eighteenth-century

Swedish mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg as well as in symbolist

literary and art theory. The investigation of symbolic forms led

Klee to investigate the roots of language as well (see the essay

by Claude Cernuschi in this volume, 105- 134).

Some artists worked directly with mediums; the Swiss-born

artist Albert von Keller participated in seances with Carl du Prel

and Schrenck-Notzing, taking photographs of the hypnotized 37 seers for future use in finished paintings on mediumistic themes.

Keller, du Prel, and Schrenck-Notzing were among the found-

Fig. 5: Alfred von Schrenck-Notzing (1862-1929), Author's Flashlight ers of the Psychologische Gesellschaft (Psychological Society) Photograph, 23 June 1913 (medium "Stanislava P." materializing in Munich in 1886. Keller studied hypnotic phenomena, and ectoplasm), in Phenomena of Materialisation (London: Kegan Paul, claimed to have received the inspiration for his major work, The Trench, Trubner, 1923), fig. 173. 38 Resurrection of Jairus' Daughter (1886), in a dream. He co-

urns" who materialized ectoplasmic or teleplasmic evidence of founded the Munich Secession in 1892, and was its president

spirit life. One of his noted research subjects was the medium from 1 896 to 1920.

Stanislava P., who displayed extraordinary talents for physical Several of Klee's self-portraits exemplify inspiration. O. K. 34 manifestations (fig. 5). Schrenck-Notzing, like many other psy- Werckmeister persuasively suggests that the missing ears and

chic researchers in Britain and Europe, followed strict procedures closed in Klee's Absorption ( Versunkenheitj (plate of eyes 41 )

for observation and recording of phenomena, utilizing the tech- 1919 may refer to a passage by Kandinsky in On The Spiritual in 35 niques of empirical science for his experiments. Art: "The artist shall be blind to 'recognized' or 'unrecognized'

Mediums insisted that they were mere vehicles for communi- form, deaf to doctrines and desires of his time. His open eye shall

cation between our world and the world of spirits. The messages be focused on his inner life, and his ear shall always be directed 39 they conveyed did not come from them, they insisted; indeed they toward the mouth of inner necessity." Werckmeister also per-

often claimed to have no memory of the seance afterward. Their ceptively linked the title Versunkenheit to a letter from Klee to his

sensitivity allowed them to respond to forces of which others were wife in February 1918:

unaware. They could enter a sort of twilight zone between the

living and the dead. This could be a powerful metaphor for the Everything around me sinks away [vers/nkf],

creative artist, as Klee noted in his description of a Zwischenwelt, and good works come into being by them-

a world of potential meanings: selves before me.... My hand is completely

the tool of a remote sphere. Neither is it my

In our time worlds have opened up which not head which functions here, but something dif-

ferent, something higher, more remote, wher-

34 Alfred von Schrenck-Notzing, Phenomena of Materialisation: A Contribution

to the Investigation of Mediumistic Teleplastics (1914), trans. E. E. Fournier

d'Albe (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1923). See also Andreas 36 Felix Klee, ed., Paul Klee: His Life and Work in Documents (New York:

Fischer, "In the Darkroom of a Medium Researcher: Albert von Schrenck- George Braziller, 1962), 183-84.

Notzing and the Phenomena of Materialization," in Claudia Dichter et al., 37 Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker and Gian Casper Bott, Seance: Albert von Keller

eds., The Message: Kunst und Okkultismus/Art and Occultism, exh. cat. and the Occult, exh. cat. (Seattle: Frye Art Museum, 2010). (Cologne: Walther Konig; Bochum: Kunstmuseum Bochum, 2007), 183- 38 Albert von Schrenck-Notzing, "Albert von Keller als Malerpsychologe und

86 . Metapsychiker," Psychische Studien 48, nos. 4-5 (Apr.-May 1921 ): 208.

35 See Wolffram, Stepchildren of Science, 141 ff. 39 Quoted in Werckmeister, The Making of Paul Klee's Career, 180. ever it may be. I must have great friends in Neither higher potentiality nor reality can be

these places, light ones, but also dark ones. of any avail to us. Away with everyday things

That's all the same to me, I find them all to be and away with the occult sciences—they are 40 of great benevolence. barking up the wrong tree. Art goes beyond

both the real and the imaginary object. Art

These two self-portraits are isolated, even withdrawn. Klee could plays an unknowing game with things. Just as not identify with the fiery passion of Franz Marc, which expressed a child at play imitates us, so we at play imi- itself through empathy with animals and a passion for destruction. tate the forces which created and are creating 43 Instead he favored the cool detachment of ghosts. In his diary he the world. wrote after the death of Marc at Verdun in 1916:

This quotation clearly shows that Klee rejected both realism and

I only try to relate myself to God, and if I am occultism, except as metaphors, and illuminates the frequent com-

in harmony with God, I don't fancy that my parison of his art to that of children. "Art is a parable of Cre-

brothers are not also in harmony with me; but ation," he wrote. Klee's works are thoughtful and sophisticated

that is their business. One of Marc's traits was explorations of the tension between the work of art as material

a feminine urge to give everyone some of his object and its meaning.

treasure. The fact that not everyone followed Unlike children's art, Klee's work often explores the tension

him filled him with misgivings about his path. between the darker aspects of human nature and the higher. He

I often anxiously surmised that he would re- expressed this dualism in terms of the daemoniacal and the celes-

turn to earthly simplicity, once the ferment was tial in his diary in 1916:

over, that he would not come back in order

to rouse the world to some grand vision, but New work is preparing itself; the demonia-

entirely from a human impulse. My fire is more cal shall be melted into simultaneity with the

like that of the dead or of the unborn. No won- celestial, the dualism shall not be treated as

41 der that he found more love. such, but in its complementary oneness. The

conviction is already present. The demonia-

Klee's unsentimental analysis unsparingly describes his cal is already peeking through here and there reserve and tendency toward detachment. He turned inward for and can't be kept down. For truth asks that all his sources of inspiration. In this emphasis on inferiority he is linked elements be present at once. It is questionable to the previous generation of symbolist artists who championed how far this can be achieved in my circum- their internal worlds, such as Fernand Khnopff and Odilon Redon. stances, which are only halfway favorable.

Khnopff's I Lock My Door Upon Myself of 1891 was purchased Yet even the briefest moment, if it is a good for the Munich Pinakothek in 1893, and was surely known to one, can produce a document of a new pitch 42 44 Klee. Similarly, Redon's Closed Eyes of 1890 foreshadows the of intensity. inward looking meditation of Versunkenheit.

Klee summed up his view of the role of art as the only valid, The daemoniacal and the celestial are not to be considered as if imperfect, transport to transcendental truths in his "Creative diametrically opposed, but joined in complementary oneness, a

Credo": new synthesis. As with William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven

and Hell, or the alchemist's quest for the conjunctio oppositorum

Art is a parable of Creation; it is an example, (union of opposites), good and evil form a new unity. Klee's ar-

as the terrestrial is an example of the cosmos.... tistic sophistication is evident in his reference to simultaneity, a

At the highest level, imagination is guided by critical term for both cubists and especially futurist artists. The

instinctual stimuli, and illusions are created visual representation of simultaneous events normally separated

which buoy us up and stir us more than do by time or space, or in Klee's case, earthly and divine (or dae-

the familiar things of earth. In that realm are moniacal and celestial) forces, adds dynamism and tension to his

born the symbols which comfort the mind, works. Klee, like Robert Delaunay, was intrigued by the simulta-

which perceives that it need not be chained to neous contrast of colors that had been a preoccupation of ear-

the potentialities of terrestrial things. Up there, lier neoimpressionists such as Georges Seurat. Delaunay, whom

ethical seriousness reigns, and along with it Klee met in Paris in 1912, termed his style orphism, suggesting the

impish laughter at the learned apparatus of connection to mysticism as well as color. For Klee, the simultane-

scholars and parsons. ous contrast of colors could be a metaphor for good and evil

and other dialectical oppositions, and he cited Delaunay as a

40 Ibid., 180-81 41 Klee, Diaries, #1008.

42 Jeffery Howe, "Dreams and Death," in The Symbolist Art of Fernand Khnopff 43 Klee, "Creative Credo," in His Life and Work, 155. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Research Press, 1982), 105-116. 44 Klee, Dianes, #1079. 172

Fig. 6: Paul Klee, Materialized Ghosts ( Materialisierte Gespenster ), 1923/24. Pen, pencil, and watercolor on paper on cardboard, 37 x 25.2 cm, Rosengart Collection, Lucerne.

45 key example. Fig. 7: Paul Klee, Ghost Chamber with the High Door (New Version)

Klee's penchant for conjoining opposites included dualities (Geisterzimmer mit der Hohen Ture [neue Fassung]), 1925/102. Sprayed and brushed watercolor, and transferred printing ink on paper, of childlike and sophisticated, abstract and realistic, interior and bordered with gouache and ink, 48.7 x 29.4 cm, The Metropolitan exterior, seen and unseen, past and present (and future), earthly Museum of Art, NY, The Berggruen Klee Collection, 1987.455.16. and spiritual, comic and deeply serious, and primitive and refined.

Some of his images, such as Materialized Ghosts ( Materialisierte glowing colors of the fuzzy forms emerge from the dark back-

Gespenster fig. resemble tribal fetishes or voodoo ground, suggestive of glowing spirits. ) (1923; 6)

dolls—a combination of childlike dolls with powerful spirits. The Spiritualists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centu-

ries sometimes explained the physical reality of ghosts as evi-

45 Klee, "Creative Credo," in His Life and Work, 154-55: "In the past artists dence of a fourth dimension existing in parallel with the first represented things they had seen on earth, things they liked seeing or three, borrowing from the mathematic and scientific concepts might have liked to see. Today they reveal the relativity of visible things; 46 they express their belief that the visible is only an isolated aspect in that inspired avant-garde artists. The astrophysicist Johann Karl

relation to the universe as a whole, and that other, invisible truths are the Friedrich Zollner concluded that the mysterious knots tied in loops overriding factors.... By including the elements of good and evil a moral of leather by the American medium Henry Slade proved the exis- sphere is created. Evil is viewed not as an enemy whom we conquer or

are conquered by, but as a force which has its share in the making of the tence of a physical fourth dimension after a series of experiments Whole, an essential factor in creation and evolution. The presence of the 47 in Leipzig in the 1870s. A fascination with such concepts of masculine principle (evil, disturbing, passionate), and the feminine principle higher realities in the futurists, Dadaists, (good, serene, growing), results in the forging of an ethical balance. was found German and

"Corresponding to this is the dialectic of forms, movement and coun-

termovement, or— if we want to put this in more elementary terms—colorism,

as in Delaunay's analysis of forms by color. Every energy calls for its com-

plement, for art is always seeking the equilibrium that arises out of the play 46 Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidian

of forces, a state in which abstract forms can become meaningful objects, or Geometry in Modern Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983).

else pure symbols as constant as numbers and letters of the alphabet. Taken 47 Klaus B. Staubermann, "Tying the Knot: Skill, Judgement, and Authority in

all together, these may become symbols of the cosmos; that is to say, they the 1870s Leipzig Spiritistic Experiments," British Journal for the History of

become a form of religious expression." Science 34, no. 1 (Mar. 2001): 67-79. Fig. 8: Paul Klee, Specter of a Warrior ( Geist eines Kriegers ), Fig. 9: Paul Klee, Phantom's Oath Gespenster-Schwur 1930/113. 1926/234. Pen on paper on cardboard, 27 x 19.4 cm, private ( ), Watercolor and red chalk on paper on cardboard, 47 x 37.4 cm, collection. Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern.

48 50 even in the Bauhaus. [neue FassungJ) (1925; fig. 7), and related works.

In the 1920s Klee created many perspective studies of inte- Klee's title is typically ambiguous and playful— is this the rep-

riors and architectural forms. These explore the technical and resentation of a mundane, but haunted house, or the apparition

theoretical implications of representing three dimensions on a of a room found on a ghostly plane of existence in the afterlife?

two-dimensional surface, an age-old metaphor for human under- Haunted interiors were often found in earlier romantic or symbol-

standing, from Plato's allegory of the cave to Marcel Duchamp's ist art, such as James Ensor's etching Haunted Furniture of 1888. 49 The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (191 5 -23). Klee's rich complexity, with implications of simultaneity and a

These perspective studies are a perfect metaphor for the intersec- critical study of the very tools of representation, makes his work

tion of planes of reality, as highlighted in his Ghost Chamber with very modern. In his "Creative Credo" he was explicit:

the High Door (New Version) ( Geisterzimmer m it der Ho hen Ture

Formerly we used to represent things visible on

48 See Timothy O. Benson, "Mysticism, Materialism, and the Machine in Berlin earth, things we either liked to look at or would

Dada," in "Mysticism and Occultism in Modern Art," ed. Linda Dalrymple have liked to see. Today we reveal the reality

Henderson, special issue, Art Journal 46, no. 1 (Spring 1987): 46-55. that is behind visible things, thus expressing See also Osamu Okuda, '"Diesseitig bin ich gar nicht fassbar' Paul Klee

und die Esoterik," in Das Bauhaus und die Esoterik, ed. Christoph Wagner the belief that the visible world is merely an (Bielefeld: Kerber, 2005), 56-63, and Linda Dalrymple Henderson, "X isolated case in relation to the universe and Rays and the Quest for Invisible Reality in the Art of Kupka, Duchamp, and that there are many more other, latent reali- the Cubists," Art Journal 47, no. 4 (Winter 1988): 323-40.

49 Duchamp drew the parallel between shadows and dimensions in explaining ties. Things appear to assume a broader and

The Large Glass: "Since I found that one could make a cast shadow from a more diversified meaning, often seemingly three-dimensional thing, any object whatsoever— just as the projecting of the contradicting the rational experience of yes- sun on the earth makes two dimensions— I thought that, by simple intellectual

analogy, the fourth dimension could project an object of three dimensions, terday. There is a striving to emphasize the es-

or, to put it another way, any three-dimensional object, which we see sential character of the accidental. 51 dispassionately, is a projection of something four-dimensional, which we

are not familiar with." Quoted in Henderson, The Fourth Dimension, 133.

See also Tom H. Gibbons, "Cubism and 'The Fourth Dimension' in the 50 Related works include: Phantom Perspective Perspectiv-Spuk The ( ) (1920);

Context of the Late Nineteenth-Century and Early Twentieth-Century Revival Other Ghost Chamber (new version) ( das andere Geisterzimmer [neue

of Occult Idealism," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 44 Fassung J) (1925); and Spiritualistic Furniture ( spiritistische Mobel) (1923).

(1981): 130-47. 51 Klee, "Creative Credo," in The Thinking Eye, 78-79. Fig. 11 : Paul Klee, Ragged Ghost ( Lumpen gespenst), 1933/465. Paste and watercolor on paper on cardboard, 48 x 33.1 cm, Zentrum

Fig. 10: Paul Klee, Fleeing Ghost ( fliehender Geist), 1929/131. Paul Klee, Bern. Oil, pen, and pencil on canvas, 89.5 x 63.5 cm, The Art Institute of

Chicago, Bequest of Claire Zeisler, 1991.1500.

Klee's perspective studies highlight one of the signal advantages of the visual image over the verbal in the representation of simultaneity in space and time. At his 1924 lecture at the Jena

Kunstverein he declared: "For we lack the means to discuss syn- 52 thetically a multidimensional simultaneity."

GHOSTS AND MODERN M ILITARISM

The carnage of war has often led to an upsurge in belief in ghosts, as bereavements on a mass scale leave so many yearning for contact with the dead. For soldiers on the front, the shock of seeing young lives snuffed out can lead to post-traumatic stress.

Klee reluctantly served in the German army, although he was spared combat duty, and his later life was spent in the shadow of increasing militarism in Germany. He died in 1940, at the beginning of the Second World War. Some of his images of ghosts are reminiscent of Otto Dix's horrifying images of dead warriors.

Klee's Specter of a Warrior ( Geist eines Kriegersj of 1926 (fig.

8) shows the haunted face of the dead soldier, still shocked by 53 the horrors of war. Several related works expand on this theme.

52 Paul Klee, "On Modern Art," (in this volume) 10.

Fig. 12: Paul Klee, Starving Spirits [ hungernde Geister), 1934/143. 53 Related works by Klee include: Military Spook ( militarischer Spuk) (1928); Pastel and oil on linen, 51 x 43.7 cm, The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift Ghost of a Warrior ( Gespenst eines Kriegers and Ghost and ) (1930); Followers [Gespenst und Mitlaufer) (1930). of Mrs. Tiffany Blake, 1948.15. -

The stiff-armed salute of

the rising German militarism is shown in Phantom's Oath 175 Gespenster-Schwur of 1930 ( )

(fig. 9). At this point in his

career, Klee was exploring

intricate and labyrinthine lin-

ear patterns. It was also typical

of him to combine multivalent

images, and the figure may

also derive from Roman sculp-

tures of leaders in the adlocutio

pose haranguing their troops,

such as the statue Augustus of Primaporta. The interwoven

linear pattern evokes the drap-

ery of classical dress. Echoes

of classical art appear often Fig. 13: Paul Klee, The Soul Departs Ent-Seelung 1934/211. Mixed media, 30.5 x 49.3 cm, Zentrum Paul ( ), Klee, Bern. in Klee's art, often in surprising contexts. His knowledge

of classical culture was deep;

he used to read Aristophanes

and other ancient writers in 54 their original language. He

recognized the Dionysian as

well as the Apollonian charac-

ter of ancient art, the rational

and the irrational, the comic

and tragic aspects.

The theme of escape is

expressed in Fleeing Ghost

( fig. fliehender Geist ) (1929;

10); the ghost may be fleeing German Fascism as well as the

bonds of earthly life. The hov-

ering two-dimensional ghost Fig. 14: Catalina Susana Garcia is moving from left to right, as Lifts Herself into the Ethereal, indicated by the angular vec- Madrid, 1905. Spiritualist photograph, location unknown. tor shapes of his elbows and

knees, and the arrow at the

bottom of the page. The pattern of horizontal lines of the back-

ground resembles wood grain, and the outline drawing of the

ghost is embedded in this grain, or perhaps burned into it.

Other works that seem to offer a commentary on contempo-

rary German social and political developments include Ragged

Ghost ( Lumpen gespenst of 1933 and Starving Spirits hun ) (

gernde Geister of (figs. 11 and Both depict themes of ) 1934 12).

poverty and hunger, which even continue to plague ghosts in the

afterlife. The famished ghosts make a good metaphor, at once

both comic and bitter, for the "starving artist" who struggled in

modern society. Starving Spirits in particular puns on the ghosts'

desire for physical nourishment, symbolized by the food on the

table that they cannot eat, and the lack of spiritual nourishment, Fig. 15: Paul Klee, Spirit of a Letter (Geist eines Briefe s), 1937/119. Pigmented paste on newspaper, 33 x 48.6 cm, The Museum of

Modern Art, NY, Purchase, 8.1939. 54 Gockel, "Paul Klee's Picture-Making," 419. X A

figure lies at the bottom of the

work, with abstract represen-

tations of the person's soul

flowering above it in abstract,

deconstructed forms (fig. 13).

This juxtaposition of the

formerly living body and the

ethereal image of the soul

departing the body was com-

mon in art influenced by spiri-

tualism, such as Alfred Kubin's

( of c. Dying Sterben ) 1899. Sonnets ~£&P~ aC Spiritualist photographs had used multiple exposures to cre-

Fig. 16: Paul Klee, Racing Somnambulist (Somnambul-rasend), 1914/91. Pen on paper on cardboard, 6.4 x ate the same effect (fig. 14). 16.6 cm, Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern. Kubin's work and such pho-

tographs are much more liter-

ally realistic than Klee's abstract rendering. Klee returned to the

theme of death and dying in his late series of drawings titled The 56 Infernal Park (der Inferner Park in 1939. This is one of his last )

series of works, created as he was increasingly ill from sclero-

derma, and represents stages of dying. Ars moriendi, the art of

dying, was as relevant in the twentieth century as it had been in

late Middle Ages. Spiritualists offered a message of hope, con-

vinced of the reality of an afterlife.

Klee's witty and poignant Spirit of a Letter ( Geist eines Briefes)

(1937; fig. 15) uses the form of an envelope, which had previ-

ously conveyed a letter, to make the image of a face and shoul-

ders inscribed upon the folds. The empty body still carries the

image of the soul that had occupied it, like an envelope that still

bears traces of the letter it carried.

SOMNAMBULISTS—MESMERISM AND TRANCE MEDIUMS Ghosts inhabit another plane of existence, presumably paral-

lel to our own. Spiritualists sought to communicate with the souls

of the dead, and one of the most commonly employed techniques

was to use a spirit medium who would enter into rapport with the

spirits of the dead while in a trance state, transitional between

/tt.t . . i IM /. MAOXF.YISM : .y/tf K^/r /// /,’T 'rft/trtt/ sleeping and waking. Such trance states were called somnambu-

lism, and were first exploited in the late eighteenth century by the Fig. 17: Ebenezer Sibly (1751 -99), Animal Magnetism: The Operator 57 1734- 1 Austrian Franz Anton Mesmer ( 815). Putting His Patient into a Crisis, engraving after Dodd, 1794, in A Key Klee's Racing Somnambulist Somnambul-rasend fig. ( ) (1914; to Physic, and the Occult Sciences (London: Champante and Whitrow, shows a somnabulist racing from left to right in the drawing. 1795), 260. 16) Klee's cynicism about such somnambulists may be indicated in

the linear depiction of a figure breaking wind in the face of the

which was curtailed in an increasingly repressive society. distorted double of the somnambulist; this scatological detail, 55 Wandering souls were a favorite topic for Klee. At times he

portrayed the actual moment of death, when the soul leaves the 56 See Franciscono, Paul Klee, 316-22. See also Hans Suter, Paul Klee and His Illness (Basel: Karger, 2010). body. In The Soul Departs Ent-Seelung of 1934 a recumbent ) ( 57 Carl Kiesewetter, Franz Anton Mesmer's Leben und Lehre, Nebt einer Vorgeschichte des Mesmerismus, Hynpotismus und Somnambulismus

(Leipzig: Max Spohr, 1893). Henri F. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the

55 Yvonne Scott, "Paul Klee's 'Anima Errante' in the Hugh Lane Municipal Unconscious (New York: Basic Books, 1970) has an extremely useful

Gallery, Dublin," Burlington Magazine 140, no. 1146 (Sept. 1998): 61 5 — overview of Mesmer and the development of hypnosis in the nineteenth 18. century. 177

- Fig. 1 8: A. M. S. de Puysegur ( 1 751 1 825), Mesmerically

Magnetized Elm Tree, in Memoirs pour servir a Thistoire et a

Tetablissement du magnetisme animal (1784; Paris: J. G. Dentu, 1820).

" ‘ ' " ET MAINTENANT DOFS. MA MIGNONNB 1

Fig. 21 : George Du Maurier ( 1834-96), Svengali puts Trilby into a

Trance (Et maintenant dors, ma mignonne! ), in Trilby (London: Osgood, Mcllvaine, 1895), 381.

reminiscent of Flemish and Dutch art, may have been suggested

by James Ensor's 1888 etching Witches in a Windstorm, which

features similar gassy imagery.

Inspired by Enlightenment discoveries of electromagnetism,

Mesmer claimed to have discovered an invisible fluid or force, 58 comparable to magnetism, that was intrinsic to all living beings.

Adepts could manipulate this vital fluid by bending it to their will

(fig. 17). Individuals in mesmeric trance were also thought to

be able to contact higher powers and spirits of the departed,

Ptames magndiisees Plantes non macndtisdes and were alleged to be able to see inside bodies to diagnose

illness. Their clairvoyance was explained by their ability to use Fig. 19: Emile Magnin (1865- 1937), Magnetized and Non- hitherto unknown capabilities of the mind to see hidden dimen- magnetized Plants Plantes magnetisees, Plantes non magnetisees in ( ), sions. Mesmer's admirers included Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart L'Art et THypnose (Geneva: Edition Atar, 1907), 4. and Marie Antoinette.

Mesmer and his followers allegedly manipulated the invisible

force fields that permeated the world, by using their willpower

to focus it on humans or anything living, including plants. It was

believed that the healing energies of the vital fluid (animal mag-

netism) could be stored in batteries and even trees through con-

centration of will, much as electricity is stored. People would later

sit near these trees, holding wires or ropes to receive the heal-

ing energy, as shown in the illustration of a mesmerically mag-

netized elm tree (fig. 18). The term "magnetic somnambulism"

was invented by the French mesmerist Armand Marie Jacques 59 de Chastenet, the Marquis de Puysegur, in 1784. In that same

year Benjamin Franklin was asked by Louis XVI to join a commis-

sion investigating the claims of the new science. The commission

tested Mesmer's claims, and found no evidence that his proce-

dures worked. Their findings did not discourage enthusiasts, how-

Fig. 20: Paul Klee, Apparatus for the Magnetic Treatment of Plants

(Apparat fur magnetische Behandlung der Pflanzen), 1921/133. Oil 58 See Robert Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France transfer and watercolor on paper on cardboard, 31.6 x 48 cm, Flarvard (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968). Art Museums/Busch-Reisinger Museum, Association Fund, BR34.80. 59 Wolffram, Stepchildren of Science, 47. 19)

Fig. 22: G. G. Zerffi (1820-92), Passing & Re-passing Current of 60 Naturphilosophie) that posited the unity of all living beings. In Positive Electricity (mesmerism scientifically explained), in Spiritualism and Animal Magnetism (London: Robert Hardwicke, 1871 frontispiece. 1907, the French psychic researcher Emile Magnin documented ), 20) a series of experiments with mesmerizing plants and people in his

book L'Art et I'Hypn ose. One set of photos showed the positive

results obtained by hypnotizing plants to make them grow (fig.

Klee's watercolor Apparatus for the Magnetic Treatment of

Plants fur of (Apparat magnetische Behandlung der Pflanzen )

1921 recalls mesmeric experiments with trees and plants (fig.

. A tube-like device mounted on a stand hovers over some

plants, presumably focusing magnetic force on them. The appa-

ratus towers over them, as if it were haranguing them with a loud-

speaker to grow. Translucent clouds of blue and pink may sug-

gest ethereal forces.

The susceptibility of some people to fall under the control of

a mesmerist led to fears of thought-control and loss of free will.

George Du Maurier's famous novel Trilby (1894) provided a

classic example of the evil hypnotist Svengali, a sinister Jewish

music teacher, who controlled the innocent Trilby, forcing her to

sing beyond her ability while in a trance. His force of will con-

trolled her and sapped her strength, eventually killing her (fig.

21 .

Hypnotized individuals, called somnambulists (sleepwalkers),

were thought to be under the control of the will of the hypno-

tizes or mesmerist. The vulnerability of the generally female sub-

jects of such trances had an implicit sexual theme. The British

Pre-Raphaelite John Everett Millais depicted a zombie-like sleep-

walker wandering the moors in his painting The Somnambulist

(1871). The French realist Gustave Courbet portrayed a similar

Fig. 23: Edvard Munch (1863- 1944), Attraction, 1896. Lithograph, figure in La Somnambule (c. 1855). 48.2 x 36.5 cm, private collection. Throughout the nineteenth century, the understanding of elec-

tromagnetism increased, and hypnotists elaborated the scientific ever. explanations of their phenomena. For instance, in 1871 G. G.

The pantheistic view of a continuum of living beings had been particularly important in Germany since the romantic era. 60 Mark Roskill, Klee, Kandinsky, and the Thought of Their Time: A Critical

Mark Roskill notes that Klee was attracted to Goethe's concepts Perspective (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 99: "Klee had been attracted to Goethe's ideas on the formative processes of creation as of creation and transformation in the plant kingdom, a romantic early as 1914—particularly as they were expressed in the 1790 essay 'On '" the Metamorphoses of Plants. )

Zerffi published a highly technical explanation of hypnosis in his

61 book Spiritualism and Animal Magnetism (fig. 22). The recipro-

cal bonding between hypnotist and subject, generally male and

female, appears in a less scientific context in Edvard Munch's

lithograph Attraction (1896; fig. 23).

The power of hypnotic trance to release hidden artistic abili-

ties became the subject of popular entertainments and pseudo-

scientific experiments. In 1904 an untrained and hypnotized

dancer, Madeleine Guipet, performed at the Schauspielhaus in 62 Munich (fig. 24). The performance was organized by Albert

von Schrenck-Notzing, and noted artists Franz von Stuck and

Albert von Keller were among those attending. Keller made at

least twenty paintings of her in the midst of her somnambulic

dance. One of these, Dream Dancer Madeleine G. in Munich, 63 1904, was published in Psychische Studien in April 1921.

Klee's Somnambulic Dancer ( Somnambule Tanzerin (1921;

fig. 25) shows a figure in a coffin-like cabinet, and another danc-

ing, like a puppet on strings, which are visible above her hands.

The puppet dancer seems to be at the control of an unseen

Svengali-like maestro. Dance, Monster to my Soft Song! ( Tanze

Du Ungeheuer zu meinem sanften Lied!) (1922; fig. 26) shows

a colossal monster dancing in the air while a small figure of a woman holding a tambourine cranks a player piano below.

Music and the will of the controlling human force the monster to do her bidding.

Later in the nineteenth century, hypnosis developed as a heal-

ing tool for hysteria as well as a spiritualist practice. World War

I left many soldiers suffering from shell shock, or post-traumatic 64 stress as we now call it. The German military used hypnosis Fig. 25: Paul Klee, Somnambulic Dancer ( Somnambule Tanzerin), as one method to treat these unfortunates; the neurologist Max 1921 /5 8. Pen on paper on cardboard, 24.1 x 1 6.3 cm, location 65 Nonne alone treated over 1,600 soldiers with hypnosis. unknown.

Toward the end of the war, popular demonstrations of hypnotism 66 also began "sprouting up like mushrooms from the earth." notizer, the subject would be helpless. The 1920 German film

The susceptibility of hypnotized subjects to respond to and directed by Robert Wiene, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari ( Das

obey the commands of the hypnotizer led to fears of complete Cabinet des Dr. Caligari) recalls both coffins and the spirit cabi-

loss of free will. If one fell under the influence of a sinister hyp- nets of trance mediums. The hapless hypnotic subject Cesare

(played by Conrad Veidt) is kept in a trance, only wakened suf-

ficiently to tell the future in traveling is to 61 G. G. Zerffi, Spiritualism and Animal Magnetism: A Treatise on Dreams, a sideshow. He forced Second Sight, Somnambulism, Magnetic Sleep, Spiritual Manifestations, obey the hypnotist Dr. Caligari, even to commit crimes. Hallucinations, and Spectral Visions (London: Robert Hardwicke, 1871): Women were considered particularly sensitive to contacts "Let P be the positive pole of the magnetizer; the electric animal fluid, C, will

stream out from it, affecting P in the magnetized, depressing her cerebral with the other world, and although this at times made them vul-

functions to D (the plexus Solaris) and N, the negative pole; from thence the nerable, it also offered opportunities for status and power that negative electric fluid, B, will be set into motion and stream towards P in the were denied them through traditional religions. Women such magnetizer, by which means a continuous stream of electricity, A, will be created, communicating the thoughts of the magnetizer to the magnetized." as Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, and Mary Baker Eddy became

62 Danzker and Bott, Seance, 67 22. leaders of large movements. Spiritualism had many adherents 63 Von Schrenck-Notzing, "Albert von Keller," 209. See also Danzker and among aristocrats, such as Baron Carl du Prel and Baron von Bott, Seance, 72; the painting is illustrated on page 73. Albert von Schrenck- Notzing published a book on her: Die Traumtanzerin Magdaleine G., Eine Schrenck-Notzing, but also provided leadership opportunities for psychologische Studie Liber Hypnose und dramatische Kunst (Stuttgart: 68 self-made individuals. There is nothing as democratic as death, Ferdinand Enke, 1904). See also: Magnin, LArt et I'Hypnose.

64 In Germany alone, 613,047 soldiers were treated for nervous disorders

acquired at the front. See Doris Kaufmann, "Science as Cultural Practice: 67 Alex Owen, The Darkened Room: Women, Power, and Spiritualism in Late

Psychiatry in the First World War and Weimar Germany," Journal of Victorian England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). See also:

Contemporary History 34, no. 1 (Jan. 1999): 125-44. Ann Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women's Rights in Nineteenth- " 65 Paul Lerner, Hysterica I Cures: Flypnosis, Gender and Performance in Century America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001).

World War I and Weimar Germany," History Workshop Journal 45 (Spring 68 For the aristocratic interest in spiritualism, see J. Trygve Has-Ellison, "Nobles, 1998): 79- 101. See also Kaufmann, "Science as Cultural Practice," 125- Modernism, and the Culture of fin-de-siecle Munich," German History

44. 26, no. 1 (2008): 1 -23. For the socialist perspective, see Logie Barrow,

66 Lerner, "Hysterical Cures," 88. "Socialism in Eternity: The Ideology of Plebeian Spiritualists, 1853-1913," 180

Fig. 27: Paul Klee, The Twittering Machine ( Die Zwitscher-Maschine ), Fig. 26: Paul Klee, Dance, Monster to my Soft Song! (Tanze Du

1922/151 . Oil transfer drawing, watercolor, and ink on paper with Ungeheuer zu meinem sanften Lied!), 1922/54. Watercolor and oil gouache and ink borders on board, 64.1 x 48.3 cm, The Museum of transfer drawing on plaster-primed gauze, 44.9 x 32.6 cm, Solomon Modern Art, NY, Purchase, 564.1939. R. Guggenheim Museum, NY.

69 after all. some higher force from outside.

Female power made some men uneasy. In his tale "The

Sandman," the German romantic author E. T. A. Hoffmann As Sigmund Freud recognized, there is something uncanny about 70 expressed the fear of being manipulated by external forces. The sexual attraction, and this effect is particularly heightened

character Nathaniel fears he has been possessed by Coppelius, a when the object of desire is a robot. The director Fritz Lang rec-

daemon in human form, who created a mechanical automaton in ognized this when he created a simulacrum of a female in his

female shape named Olympia to lure him from his beloved Clara. film Metropolis of 1927. A similar female robot was created by

Nathaniel is powerless to resist the charms of the deceptive the magician Edison in Villiers de I'lsle Adam's 1 884 novel L'Eve

71 Olympia, and he fears this is a revelation of how all free will is Future Tomorrow's Eve). Thomas Edison was considered a kind (

an illusion: of sorcerer in the popular imagination, and was the inspiration

for the French author.

Everything, the whole of life, had become for Automata, or mechanical beings, have been constructed

him a dream and a feeling of foreboding; he since the time of ancient Greece, but they became particularly

spoke continually of how each of us, thinking sophisticated in eighteenth-century France. Many of these were

himself free, was in reality the tortured play-

thing of mysterious powers: resistance was

69 E. T. A. Hoffmann, "The Sandman," in Tales of Hoffmann (Baltimore: vain; we had humbly to submit to the decrees Penguin Books, 1982), 103.

of fate. went so far as to assert that it He was 70 Sigmund Freud, "The Uncanny" (1919), in The Standard Edition of the folly to think the creations of art and science Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 17 (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), 218-52. the product of our own free will: the inspiration 71 Villiers de I'lsle Adam, Tomorrow's Eve [ L'Eve Future ], trans. Robert

which alone made creation possible did not Martin Adams (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2001). See also proceed from within us but was effectuated by Asti Hustvedt, "Science Fictions: The Future Eves of Villiers de I'lsle Adam and Jean-Martin Charcot," in The Decadent Reader: Fiction, Fantasy, and Perversion from Fin-de-Siecle France, ed. Asti Hustvedt (New York: Zone History Workshop 9 (Spring 1980): 37-69. Books, 1998),498-518. (Bo Model.) 2 Sheets— Sheet 1. T. A. EDISON. PHONOGRAPH DOLL.

No, 456,301. Patented July 21, 1891,

Fig. 28: Thomas Edison (1847- 1931 ). Phonograph Doll. US Patent

filed issued 1891. 456,301 , July 30, 1890, and July 21, Fig. 30: Paul Klee, Rider Unhorsed and Bewitched ( Abgeworfener

und verhexter Reiter), 1920/62. Pen on paper on cardboard, 19.4 x 21.3 cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, The Berggruen Klee Collection, 1987.315.21.

automata, self-motivated machines. 73

The eerie effect of such musical automata is suggested in

Klee's The Twittering Machine ( Die Zwitscher-Maschine ) (1922;

fig. 27). The birds are trapped on a diabolical hurdy-gurdy, pow-

ered by a crank with a handle at left. When the crank is turned,

the birds must sing. Although it might seem comical, the birds are

captive and suggest comparison to artists who must entertain on

command. The mechanism of this device resembles the interior

construction of real mechanical toys that spoke or played music,

such as Thomas Edison's Talking Doll, which was manufactured

in 1890 (figs. 28 and 29). The long Swiss and Bavarian tradi-

tion of making mechanical birds for cuckoo clocks was also cer-

tainly a factor, and the title puns on the term for the Swiss dialect,

Switzerdeutsch.

Sometimes the artist was considered to be a kind of vessel for

external forces to manifest themselves. Surrealist artists sought con-

tact with the unconscious for artistic inspiration through processes

thought to circumvent the conscious mind, such as automatic writ-

ing and experiments with chance effects. These were based on

practices of trance mediums who had used automatic writing to

transmit the messages of spirits since the nineteenth century. Klee

was named in Andre Breton's Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, and

74 Fig. 29: Thomas Edison, The Manufacture of Edison's Talking Doll, his work was reproduced in La Revolution Surrealiste. Art and Scientific no. (Apr. 257. American 62, 17 26, 1890): the creative process seemed to tap into higher forces, and Klee

himself could be surprised by what he drew. When he entered designed to play music, such as the female dulcimer player the Zwischenwelt (in-between world) of art, he sometimes felt that 72 acquired by Marie Antoinette in 1785. The Bauhaus experi- he was not fully in command; rather that he was possessed by ments in theater promoted an aesthetic that seemed based on the artistic creativity. As he wrote, "My hand is completely the tool of

72 The female musician, wearing an elegant dress, sits before the dulcimer, and

seems to play it with moving arms. The works were made by Peter Kintzing 73 Juliet Koss, "Bauhaus Theater of Human Dolls," Art Bulletin 85, no. 4 (Dec.

and the cabinet by David Roentgen (in collection of Musee Nationale des 2003): 724-45.

Arts et Metiers, Paris). 74 Franciscono, Paul Klee, 277. )

182

Fig. 33: Paul Klee, Witches' Sabbath ( Walpurgis nacht), 1935/121.

Fig. 31: Paul Klee, Brewing Witches ( brauende Hexen), 1922/12. Oil Gouache on cloth laid on wood support, 72.5 x 68.2 cm, Tate, transfer and watercolor on paper on cardboard, 32 x 27.5 cm, Neue London, Purchased 1964, T00669.

Nationalgalerie, Berlin. a remote sphere." 75

WITCHES AND ENCHANTMENT Even before Mesmer and sinister hypnotists, there were leg-

ends of witches and magicians who consorted with daemons

and used dark forces to control others. Many of Klee's works

feature magic and witches, and they frequently look back to his-

torical images made during the widespread belief in witchcraft in

the late Middle Ages and early modern period. Rider Unhorsed

and Bewitched ( Abgeworfener und verhexter Reiter evokes the )

image of a knight thrown from his horse while under the spell of a

witch (fig. 30). Klee's The Witch with a Comb ( Die Hexe m it dem

Ka mm) (1922; plate 31), created while he was at the Bauhaus

in Weimar, shows a somewhat comical image of a witch with

a tall Spanish-style comb. Her stern demeanor combines vanity

and menace, and her hands are replaced by downward pointing

arrows. This work was produced as part of a portfolio by various

artists who donated their works to the German museum of the

76 book in Leipzig.

Witches often employed potions to effect their spells, and

Klee's Brewing Witches ( brauende Hexen (1922; fig. 31) shows witches gathered around a cauldron, with the large num-

ber seven hovering over it. Seven was believed to have mysti-

cal significance in many traditions. The scene of seated witches

brewing up a spell recalls Hans Baldung Grien's 1520 image

75 Quoted in Werckmeister, The Making of Paul Klee's Career, 180-81. Fig. 32: Hans Baldung Grien (c. 1484-1545), Witches' Sabbath, 76 Kunstlerspende fur das Deutsche Buchmuseum (Leipzig: Deutsche Verein fur 1520. Chiaroscuro woodcut, 37.5 x 25.4 cm, Museum of Fine Arts, Buchwesen und Schrifttum, 1922). Boston, Fund in memory of Horatio Greenough Curtis, 27.1293. ) )

183

Fig. 36: Georges Demeny (1850-1917), [Fencer], 1906. Gelatin silver

print, 17.5 x 26.5 cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, Purchase,

Alfred Stieglitz Society Gifts, 2010.1.

echoes the linear pattern of Baldung Grien's chiaroscuro wood-

cut. Klee's linear patterns are extremely varied, and here create

an effect of shimmering vibration that seems analogous to the

ethereal spirits, a kind of spiritual synaesthesia, evoking a higher

plane of existence through equivalent visual marks.

Sometimes the spells were directed at individuals, as was

alleged in the Salem witch trials, and as seen in Klee's Rider

Unhorsed and Bewitched (fig. 30). Other times the spells were

used to bring general misfortune, often through lightning and

hailstorms to ruin crops. Klee's Spellbound Lightning ( Gebannten

Blitz) (1927; fig. 34) echoes many early tales and images of

witches summoning storms, as in a 1486 illustration (fig. 35).

Witches were symbols of disruption and chaos in the late Middle

Ages. The orderly fabric of the city and society is threatened by

Fig. 34: Paul Klee, Spellbound Lightning ( Gebannter Blitz), 1927/249. the jagged bolt of black lightning, which also cuts through the Watercolor on paper on cardboard, 44.2 x 29.8 cm, Albertina, Vienna. unsteady ladder supporting an individual teetering on the frag-

ment, about to fall.

Clairvoyance and the power of witches to cast spells at long

distance were pre-modern forms of simultaneity, and this is part

of their attraction for Klee. Instantaneity and the superimposition

of moving forms fascinated Klee. Discussing his 1929 work Jester

in a State of Trance (Narr in Trance), Klee once remarked to his

students: "The jester in a state of trance might be taken as an 77 example of superimposed instant views of movement." Klee

was fascinated with movement and the temporal element of art.

In his "Creative Credo" he wrote:

All becoming is based on movement. In Less-

ing's Laocoon, on which we wasted a certain

amount of intellectual effort in our younger Fig. 35: Hans Vintler (fl. 1407- 19), Witch Using a Bone to Summon days, a good deal of fuss is made about the a Hailstorm (woodcut), in The Book of Virtue ( Das Buoch der Tugend difference between temporal spatial art. (Augsburg: Johann Blaubirer, 1486), 313. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, and Munich. But on closer scrutiny the fuss turns out to be

mere learned foolishness. For space itself is a of the Witches' Sabbath, where a group of witches sit around temporal concept. a cauldron while some fly through the air (fig. 32). Klee's painting Witches' Sabbath ( Walpurgis nacht (1935; fig. 33) even 77 Klee, The Thinking Eye, 130. 79 among the leaders of National Socialism in Germany. In 1933

Klee was dismissed from his teaching position at the Academy in 184 Dusseldorf under pressure from the Nazis, who considered the freedom and imagination inherent in Klee's art to be dangerous.

His dismissal was hailed in the right-wing journal Deutsche Kultur- 80 Wacht. His stubborn individualism was not to be tolerated in

the new society.

Magic was a rich metaphor for the creative process, suggest-

ing explanations for the power of art and the source of inspira-

tion. The artist, like a magician or witch, employed symbols to cre-

ate effects that he only partly understood. Klee's exploration of

hidden realities led him to both modernist and primitive concerns,

and besides the ghosts, mesmerists, and witches that this essay

has discussed, his imagery includes daemons, nature spirits, dev-

ils, monsters, fairy tales, and magic. These pre-modern legends

gave him material for satire and allegory, and served as keys for Fig. 37: Paul Klee, Bewitched and in a Hurry (verhext und eilig), him to delve into the nature of reality—they were metaphors for 1933/62. Watercolor on paper, 49 x 63 cm, private collection. his artistic quest. Combining these archaic themes with abstract

...The space in which we move belongs to form, Klee made a striking new synthesis. Klee's studio was often

time, character belongs to movement. Only compared to a magician's workshop. His art defies categoriza- 78 the dead point is timeless. tion, and he noted that it was not for everyone:

Klee emphasized the temporal element in creating a work of art, There where the central organ of all temporal-

and in perceiving it. It takes time to create it and time to perceive spatial animatedness, whether we call it the

it. He approvingly quoted the philosopher Feuerbach who ob- brain or the heart of Creation, occasions all

served that a chair is needed to properly appreciate a work of the functions: who as an artist would not want

art. to dwell there? In the womb of nature, in the

The study of movement and a reconsideration of the role of primal ground of Creation, which holds the se-

time in art was one of the hallmarks of early modernism. Klee cret key to everything that is?

shared this interest with Marcel Duchamp and the Italian futur-

ists. They were in turn inspired by late nineteenth-century efforts But not everyone should head there! Each

to develop a method of photographing movements over time, person should move in the domain where the

81 combining various stages of movement in one image. Eadweard beat of his heart tells him he should move. H

Muybridge and Etienne-Jules Marey were the leaders in the

discovery of this chronophotography. Georges Demeny was

Marey's principal assistant who helped him develop his method

in the 1880s. After Marey's death he continued to make studies

of athletes. His chronophotograph of a fencer (fig. 36) makes a

good comparison to Klee's Bewitched and in a Hurry ( verhext

fig. und eilig ) (1933; 37). Klee's work shows both repeated

circles indicating the positions of the head as the figure moves,

and swooping lines suggest continuous and rapid motion. The

angle of the boots almost suggests a military goose-step march,

and this may be another work which relates to the growing

79 G. L. Mosse, "The Mystical Origins of National Socialism," Journal of the militarism in Germany at the time. Klee's drawing Militarism of

History of Ideas 22, no. 1 (Jan. -Mar. 1 961 ): 81 -96. Corinna Treitel points

Witches ( militarismus der Hexenj completes the link between the out that the historical connections between National Socialism and occult-

rise of totalitarianism and a witch's curse (1933; plate 52). A ism in Germany actually have a wide spectrum, from belief to hostility, in Treitel, A Science for the Soul, 210-42. witch beats a drum over the body of a fallen victim, while a troop 80 Robert Scholz, Deutsche Kultur-Wacht, no. 10 (1933): 5. Quoted in Peter marches in unison, like sleepwalkers, in the background. The ner- Adam, Art of the Third Reich (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1992), 65. vous line suggests a rapid beat of the drum and pace of the Adam quotes Scholz: "The fact that Paul Klee and Edwin Scharff have been dismissed, from the academies in Berlin and Dusseldorf by our Minister of marchers. Although theosophy and Freemasonry were banned Culture is an important step on the road to liberation from fourteen years of

by the Nazis, many have noted the predilection for the occult the enslavement of German art by alien elements. ..the fact that one once

considered Paul Klee a great artist will be seen by future generations as

a sign of a complete spiritual sellout.... We do not reject the modernists because they are modern but because they are spiritually destructive."

78 Klee, "Creative Credo," in The Thinking Eye, 78. 81 Klee, "On Modern Art," 14. Stephen H. Watson The Sublime Continuum: Klee's Cosmic Simultaneities

The formal has to fuse with the Weltanschauung.

—Paul Klee 1

When our experience has turned into a real process in a real world and our phenomenal

time has spread itself out over this world and assumed a cosmic dimension, we are not

satisfied with replacing the continuum by the exact concept of the real number, in spite of

the essential and undeniable inexactness arising from what is given.... Here we discover

genuine reason which lays bare the Logos dwelling in reality (just as purely as is possible

for this consciousness which cannot "leap over its own shadow").

—Hermann Weyl 2

The graphic universe consists of light and shadow.... We investigate the formal for the

sake of expression and the insight into our soul which are thereby provided.

-Paul Klee 3

Christian Geelhaar noted that Klee's polyphonic principle of creation "moves like a Leitmotiv through a

4 large part of the artist's work in the early thirties, but also appears later on." When most explicit, it perhaps

best reveals the complicated syntax and semantics that make up the ironic depths of Klee's work. Through them, he articulated the work of art as an event in "cosmological" space and time whose ontological tensions were not readily resolved. Klee's concern with the polyphonic also elaborates its own retrograde effect: an

interest in the relation between music and graphic art that began as early as 1905. In one of his most impor-

tant diary entries, dating from July 1917, this concern yielded a claim regarding the superiority of graphic art

to music. Its assertion, as ever in Klee, was not lacking in irony. Written while he was working in a military

payroll department, his account begins by acknowledging its own connection to the world: "Thoughts at the

5 open window for the payroll department." The superiority of the graphic arts, Klee stated, derives from the

fact that "here the time element becomes spatial. The notion of simultaneity [ Gleichzeitigkeit] stands out even

1 Paul Klee, The Diaries of Paul Klee, 1898-1918, ed. Felix Klee (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964), #1081. 2 Hermann Weyl, The Continuum: A Critical Examination of the Foundation of Analysis, trans. Stephen Pollard and Thomas Bole (Lanham, MD: Thomas Jefferson University Press, 1987), 93. 3 Klee, Diaries, #1081. 4 Christian Geelhaar, Paul Klee and the Bauhaus (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1973), 133. 5 Klee, Diaries, #1081. 185 ." 6 more richly Still, as dense as it is rich, in tying together a number Klee found Mozart and Bach more modern than the music of the

of elements in Klee's work, the entry leaves one grappling for its nineteenth century. These were not epic times—any more than 186 significance. The discussion of simultaneity emerges in this entry the simultaneity he explored involved an epic event answering as part of Klee's passage beyond the optical—the visible—to the to a simple act or an enactment. Polyphony's formal simultane-

invisible: ity of independent themes escapes such simplistic or univocal

reductions. Even so, the superiority of the graphic line, Klee held,

The real truth, to begin with, remains invisible, was clear. "If in music, the time element could be overcome by

beneath the surface. The colors that captivate a retrograde motion [ Ruckwartsbewegung ] that would penetrate

." 12 are not lighting but light. The graphic universe consciousness, then a renaissance might still be thinkable But

consists of light and shadow. The diffused clar- without it the musical (like the literary) work of art remains bound

ity of slightly overcast weather is richer in phe- to the dispersions of succession, falling short of the cosmic dimen-

nomena than a sunny day. A thin stratum of sion Klee privileged in the graphic.

," 13 cloud just before the stars break through. It is "That everything is transitory is merely a simile Klee began.

difficult to catch and represent this, because In some sense, "everything is polyphonic" must be too. Despite his

the moment is so fleeting. It has to penetrate interest in the link between music and his art, here the thesis is that

our soul. The formal has to fuse with the Welt- music fails. And so does its paradigm, the temporality of musical

7 anschauung . simultaneity. The notion that the first note of a musical work antici-

pates the last (and the last contains the first) is often invoked as the

The simultaneous is not the momentary; it is not the instanta- model of iterable identity. Still, Klee claims it falls short of graphic

neous. The occurrence of the momentary, simple motion, Klee simultaneity, which retains the "retrograde motion" explicitly. And,

states, "strikes us as banal" [kommt uns banal vor). Klee joins it is already clear that Klee's point is by no means a simple one.

those like Benjamin and Gadamer in rejecting the instantaneous- The retrograde motion is not a simple accompaniment of musical

ness of modern "optical" sensation as a narrowing of experience identity.

8 ( Erfarhung ). It is true, as Hans Robert Jauss aptly demonstrated No more than any other concept, the concept of polyphony

in their wake, that the modern emphasis upon perception, from is not self-sufficient. Klee is not simply a musical painter even if

impressionism onward, had dehierarchized the ancient analogies he often uses this medium as a model, one not without ironic

9 (and ideologies) of reality . But the experience of instantaneous implications.

sensation that resulted also readily succumbed to the Weberian

diagnosis of modern disenchantment, spurred on by an instru- There is polyphony in music. In itself the attempt

mental rationality devoid of transcendence. As Weber's student to transpose it into art would offer no special in-

Georg Lukacs had put it, the experience that accompanies mod- terest. But to gather insights into music through

ern life is that of a world devoid of essence, immanence, and the special character of polyphonic works, to

homeland—an impenetrable world the writer can articulate only penetrate deep into this cosmic sphere, to issue

10 ironically . But we perhaps should not limit such considerations forth a transformed beholder of art, and then

to the moral at the expense of the scientific. There is perhaps also to lurk in waiting for these things in the picture,

no little irony in Einstein's turn to Hume's skepticism concerning that is something more. For the simultaneity of

empiricism to overcome Mach's need to immanently link time to several independent themes is something that

sensation. Here, too, simultaneity would require more than the is possible not only in music; typical things in

instantaneous conjunction of impressionist points. If modern con- general do not belong just in one place but

fidence regarding the evidence of sensation had seemed incon- have their roots and organic anchor every-

14 testable, its phenomenologies of perception would need to part where and anywhere .

company with such supposed immanence.

Klee further details the musical figure at stake here. Polyphony Such ironic simultaneity is more than a set of "independent musi-

in music "helped to some extent to satisfy this need. A quintet as cal themes." Nor is it simply limited to art. Here perhaps we find

1 ' in Don Giovanni is closer to us than the epic motion in Tristan." a first inkling of why the Diaries' considerations on simultaneity

note the importance of Robert Delaunay. But here, too, it is not

6 Ibid. so simple. Klee's explicit reference is again a musical one: "De-

7 Ibid. launay strove to shift the accent in art onto the time element, after 8 See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Crossroad, 1989), 127; Walter the fashion of a fugue, by choosing formats that could not be 15 Benjamin, "The Storyteller," in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: encompassed in one glance ." For Klee, Delaunay's simultaneity Schocken Books, 1969), 83-109.

9 Hans Robert Jauss, Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics, trans.

Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 73ff. 12 Ibid.

10 See Georg Lukacs, The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock 13 Ibid.

(Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1971), 14 Paul Klee, Notebooks, Volume I : The Thinking Eye, 5th ed., ed. Jurg Spiller, 36-37. trans. Ralph Manheim (London: Lund Humphries, 1978), 296.

11 Klee, Dianes, #1081. 15 Klee, Diaries, #1081. ,

neither dissolves time nor reduces the rhythms of its distention into all the conventional methods of painting. In his works there is the 22 an encompassing glance or vision. Strictly taken, Klee states, it retinal image, the image in the popular sense of imagery." involves a work that is Unubersehbar. Guillaume Apollinaire's reviews of Delaunay's 1912 paintings, 187 Now Klee's proximity to Delaunay's own account of simulta- also appearing in Der Sturm, claimed that their visual accomplish-

neity at this point is clear. Klee had translated Delaunay's "Light" ment through the fusion of the entire canvas with light became

16 (1912) into German in Der Sturm. While we will need to ulti- the painterly embodiment of poetic transcendence. Delaunay

mately parse their differences, many of the themes of Klee's writ- had said, "We are no longer dealing here either with effect

ings seem to be found there in lineament: the rhythmic simultaneity (neoimpressionism within impressionism), or with objects (cubism

of the work of art, the need to free the line, the emphasis on vision, within impressionism), or with images (the physics of impression-

detachment from the object, description, the literary, mimesis, and, ism within impressionism)." Rather, simultaneous contrast is not

17 throughout, the emphasis upon the harmony of nature. only "the most powerful means to express reality," but "a purely 23 Constance Naubert-Riser has noted that Klee's translations expressive art." Apollinaire commented, "simultaneity alone is

not only edited Delaunay's work into paragraphs, but involved creation." Even more, alluding to the contrast between eternal

a "personal interpretation" emphasizing "the autonomy of the and finite temporality he stated, "simultaneity is life itself, and in work viewed as an organism," an emphasis reflecting his own whatever order the elements of a work succeed each other, leads

18 24 account of the work as a dialogue between self and world. For to an ineluctable death; but the creator knows only eternity."

Delaunay, impressionism had been the birth of light in painting, Thereafter Apollinaire and Delaunay entered into an artistic

making possible a new encounter with Nature: and conceptual conversation that impacted one another's paint-

ing and poetry but also Klee's own conceptual and artistic work, 25 Impressionism is the birth of Light in painting— as this diary entry evidences. Delaunay prophesied that in the

Light reaches us through our perception demise of cubism the metier of simultaneity would thus provide,

Without visual perception, there is no light, no like the universality of its reality, an aesthetic of all the crafts: "fur- 26 movement. nishings, dresses, books, posters, sculpture, etc."

Light in Nature creates color-movement But how is Klee's work related to what Delaunay was calling

Movement is provided by relationships of "simultaneism" and perhaps "cubism" in general? Excellent books 27 uneven measures have been written on the topic. What is theoretically germane

Of color contrast among themselves that here is a conceptual debate internal to general interpretations of

make up Reality. cubism. Interpretations of simultaneity in cubism are often divided.

This reality is endowed with Depth (we see as Some see in it the construction of independent objects based on

far as the stars) and thus a multiplicity of profiles (a Kantian interpretation) while others see

becomes rhythmic simultaneity. in it a simultaneity of experienced sequences (a la Bergson, who,

Simultaneity in light is the harmony, the color not incidentally, showed some interest in cubism and considered

28 rhythms which writing about it). The division expressed in these two interpreta-

19 give birth to Man's sight. tions not only has ancient conceptual roots, but also is not without

effect in contemporary debates on time and objectivity. It reso-

Georges Seurat divided the color of an object, splitting the nates even in the most significant philosophical debates on these

color into its component parts. Here he followed the laws of simul- issues, for example, that concerning the "Continental divide" 29 taneous contrast first articulated by Michel Eugene Chevreul's between Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger. 20 1839 De la loi du contraste simultane des couleurs. Geelhaar

notes that some of Klee's polyphonic paintings still depend on 22 Delaunay and Delaunay, Art of Color, 52. 21 this technique. But its importance for Delaunay (and Klee) was 23 Ibid., 92.

24 Ibid., 93. never simply technical. As Delaunay put it, "Seurat did not have 25 See Kathryn Porter Aichele, "Paul Klee's Compositions with Windows: An the audacity to push composition to the point of breaking with Homage and an Elegy," in The Pictured Word: Word and Image Interactions

2, ed. M. Heusser, C. Cluver, L. Hoek, and L. Weingarden (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998), 109-120.

16 Robert Delaunay, "Uber das Licht," trans. Paul Klee, Der Sturm 3, nos. 144- 26 Delaunay and Delaunay, Art of Color, 48. 45 (Jan. 1913): 255-56. 27 See, for example, Jim M. Jordan, Paul Klee and Cubism (Princeton: 17 Robert and Sonia Delaunay, The New Art of Color: The Writings of Robert Princeton University Press, 1984).

and Sonia Delaunay, trans. David Shapiro and Arthur A. Cohen (New 28 See, for example, the discussions of Robert Mark Antliff, "Bergson and York: Viking, 1978), 81 -83. Cubism: A Reassessment," Art Journal 47, no. 4 (Winter 1988): 341 -48;

1 8 See Constance Naubert-Riser, La creation chez Paul Klee (Paris: Klincksieck, Paul Crowther, "Cubism, Kant, and Ideology," Word and Image 3, no. 2

1978), 60-61. Pierre Francastel notes that Delaunay's original text was (Apr.-June 1987): 195-201; J. M. Nash, "The Nature of Cubism: A Study

closely related to contemporary poetry. See Delaunay and Delaunay, Art of Conflicting Interpretations," Art History 3, no. 4 (Dec. 1980): 435-47. of Color, 145. Antliff notes that Bergson tentatively agreed to write a preface to La Section 19 Delaunay and Delaunay, Art of Color, 81. d'Or exhibition of 1912 ("Bergson and Cubism," 341). Put otherwise,

20 See Sherry A. Buckberrough, Robert Delaunay: The Discovery of at stake in this debate is the classical interpretation of experience as a

Simultaneity (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Research Press, factical event Erlebnis versus its systematic exposition and construction 1982), ( ) 103. [Erfahrung).

21 Geelhaar, Klee and the Bauhaus, 141. 29 See Peter E. Gordon, Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos too, Klee seemingly followed

him. But if this returns us to the 188 problem of time, to the problem of succession and simultaneity,

how then is what Klee is calling

polyphony to be understood?

As Apollinaire's character-

ization alluded to above, the

history of the concept of time

yields two concepts of simulta-

neity, each with a complicated

descent. We can also see their

effect in Klee, even explicitly

in works such as Cosmic and

Earthly Time ( kosmische und

irdische Zeit fig. ) (1927; 1). Described as one of Klee's

most bittersweet presentations

of such themes, here sacred

and secular, heavenly and

earthly, finite and eternal time

are counterposed, simultane-

ously and precariously bal-

anced from a large pendulum-

Fig. 1 : Paul Klee ( 1 879- 1 940), Cosmic and Earthly Time ( kosmische und irdische Zeit), 1927/285. Pen, ink, 33 like figure. Still, the dispersion and watercolor on paper, mounted on cardboard, 41 .1 x 49.8 cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection, 950-134-117. is both conceptual and histori-

cal. Apollinaire's equation of

Delaunay's "orphic" cubism is often (both historically and simultaneity with eternity and

conceptually) linked to Bergson. Picasso's cubism is seen as life directly echoes Boethius's definition of eternity as "the com- 34 more Kantian, especially by those comparing him with Einstein, plete simultaneous and perfect possession of interminable life."

stressing his transformation of the perspectivism of post-Renais- This is contrasted with sempiternity, the state of simply lasting end-

sance art (though such claims were also made by Apollinaire lessly, a conception with modern effect in Hegel's criticisms of 30 35 of Delaunay). Suffice it to say that, here as elsewhere, when it "the spurious infinite."

came to matters of form, Klee kept his options open, defending The contrast between eternity and finite or mortal time intrinsic

intuition even as he developed the famous Bauhaus constructivist to Apollinaire's account also had ancient precursors. Augustine,

theories that were received, with a nod toward Newton, as the for example, had found the measure of time in God, beyond

31 Principia Aesthetica of the modern age. the inconstancy of finite experience, thereby tacitly assuming

Moreover, as has become evident, his attachment to the musi- two standpoints for the experience of time. Time itself however

cal analogue was also mixed. If in the diary entry cited above would not have existed without finitude, without creation: "before

he explicitly cites Delaunay's fugue suggestion, Delaunay himself heaven and earth there was no time." Creation involves change, 36 already abandoned the musical analogy. He did so probably requires motion and "change cannot exist simultaneously." God

after reading Leonardo's treatise that had claimed a certain supe- thus is not in time but precedes it: "all your 'years' exist simultane-

riority for painting over the finitude afflicting the inner coherence ously." Still the question of a plurality of times had already been

of music. In music "the fact of giving the parts separately in succes- broached in Aristotle's original (albeit somewhat circular) defini-

32 sive time prevents the memory from perceiving harmony." Here, tion linking time and its measure as "the number of motion with

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). 33 See Richard Verdi, Klee and Nature (New York: Rizzoli, 1985), 175.

30 See Arthur I. Miller, Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty that 34 Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy 5.6.

Causes Havoc (New York: Basic Books, 2001 ). 35 See G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (New York:

31 See Herbert Read, A Concise History of Modern Painting (New York: Humanities Press, 1969). Hegel criticized the spurious infinite in Kant

Praeger, 1959), 186. Cf. the similar claim of Hubert Damisch, "Equals and Fichte's account of the sublime and regulative reason (see 22 8ff. ).

Infinity," Twentieth Century Studies, nos. 15-16 (1976): 56-81. Damisch Hegel maintained that in the relations articulated, one side, the ego's, still

claims, with reference to the modern formalization of geometry, that "preponderates," transforming the quantitative relation into a qualitative

Klee's work overcomes the subjective phenomenological foundations of one (233). Hermann Weyl (and those in his wake) will make similar claims

perspective. This claim will not receive further attention here but will be about the continuum, as shall be seen, but precisely by contesting the

examined in detail in a second part of this study. Aufhebung at work in Hegel's adjudication.

32 See Buckberrough, Robert Delaunay, 108-109. 36 Augustine, The City of God 1 1 .6. 37 respect to the before and the after." Aristotle himself claimed that cubist interpretation; while providing a constructivist account of

time is what is counted and not that with which we count, resisting the picture plane, he still defended the requisites of intuition. If 38 thereby the possibility that each of them has a different time. The

modern conception of absolute time put any such indetermina- to Seurat's contrasted color, the rhythmic Wechsel that underlies 45 cies to rest. Suarez still distinguished between the intrinsic motion his art is not color, nor does he affirm orphic metaphysics. As

of a body and mental time, "imaginary continuous succession." Franciscono points out, in orphic metaphysics there is a certain 46 But Gassendi, prefiguring Newton but also Kant's constructivist return of allegory, one that Klee's ironic tensions refuse. Like

transcendental aesthetic, claimed that there is no other time than Oscar Luthy, about whom Klee wrote in 1912, Jordan notes, "He

"imaginary" time, a time that is necessary and "would flow even does not go the dangerous way of Delaunay.... He knows how 39 if the heavens were not moving." It would take Einstein to ques- to hold the object in conciliatory relationship, although the picture 47 tion the assumption, calling its concomitant notion of simultaneity idea predominates in strength."

and the archive of its various theoretical parameters into question. Not long after his early encounter with cubism, Klee's writ-

On Kantian "constructivist" interpretations of cubism, Picasso ings began to stress the temporal aspects of the work. He suc-

(like Einstein) invents a new form of representation: "the simulta- cinctly expressed it in 1914: "Becoming is more important than 48 neous representation of entirely different viewpoints, the sum of being." The conception of the work became temporal through 40 which constitutes the object." Indeed the argument has been and through, its links to allegory fragmented. Yet as the 1917

made that Picasso's advance here was not simply metaphorically diary entry we are considering notes, Klee's simultaneity is also tied to Einstein's. Both had depended in course on Poincare's dis- the simultaneity of its Weltanschauung. His encounter with the

cussion of non-Euclidean geometry. Gleizes and Metzinger's clas- First World War would only further emphasize its "worldhood."

41 sic 1912 study, Cubism, had first made the connection explicitly. Despite claims that Klee's idealism amounted to an evasion of

But the authors of Cubism also followed Bergson and Poincare in Realpolitik or Neue Sachlichkeit, Klee's commentators have justly

claiming that cubists do not follow traditional artistic convention noted the proximity of Klee's stress on the temporality of art to 42 49 but have recourse to "tactile and motor sensations." At stake in Heidegger's In-der-Welt-sein , Klee's claim that the formal must

such a "synthesis" is not an object but an experience. Bergson fuse with the Weltanschauung might indeed be taken as a gloss on

argued that such an experience or duree had to be discon- the formal indications of Heidegger's concept of temporal factic-

nected from its objective formulation in space. On this account, ity. Heidegger had criticized Bergson not only for his interpreta-

Aristotle's mistake was not his inability to deal with the relativity of tion of Aristotle, but Heidegger's own ensuing understanding of

simultaneity but to think about simultaneity in spatial terms at all. time had itself emerged from an interpretation of Aristotle.

Duration was intrinsically simultaneous, the past is always pres- Indeed, the unpublished sections of Heidegger's mag-

ent. Reflection organizes experience by utility; its objectification, num opus, Being and Time, were to culminate in an analysis of

consequently, constitutes the fallacy. Clearly Delaunay's orphic Aristotle's essay on time—as were his earlier lectures on the History 50 experience, whose poetics metamorphosizes simultaneity into a of the Concept of Time. While these remained promissory notes 43 transcendental appearance, resonates here. we can find hints of such an analysis in his lectures at the time, for

Klee's work reveals the cubists' effect as early as 1913. His example, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, written in 1927,

early written reviews stress in this regard that for "this school of where his analysis appears as part of a chapter on the problem of

form-philosophers 'construction' was more than a means for ear- ontological difference. Here, too, perhaps, proximate to Klee, we 44 lier epochs, it was indeed their characteristic." His work utilizes might encounter the problem of simultaneity hovering.

many of the motifs of cubist syntax. Yet he answers to neither Heidegger's position can be summarized here only briefly. His

discussion began singling out Bergson's contribution in the most

recent period. He noted, on the one hand, Bergson's attempts 37 Aristotle, Physics 220a.

38 Ibid., 233b. to break with the common conception of time and, on the other,

39 The above citations are taken from standard translations. These are his critical examination of Einstein's theory of relativity. Bergson, collected in Max Jammer, Concepts of Simultaneity: From Antiquity to as has been seen, began with a criticism of Aristotle's pointal- Einstein and Beyond (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). As

will become evident, Heidegger's Being and Time will undertake a radical

reinterpretation of this tradition. Compare Heidegger's later recapitulation

of that treatise with reference to the concepts of eternity and sempiternity 45 I have further detailed the concept of Wechsel in Klee's work in my Crescent

in Schelling's Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Joan Moon over the Rational: Philosophical Interpretations of Paul Klee (Stanford: Stambaugh (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1985), 171. Stanford University Press, 2009).

40 Miller, Einstein , Picasso, 106. 46 Marcel Franciscono, Paul Klee: His Life and Thought (Chicago: University of

41 Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger, "Cubism," in Modern Artists on Art, ed. Chicago Press, 1991), 164.

Robert L. Herbert (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1964), 8. 47 Klee, "Die Ausstellung des Modernen Bundes," 703, cited in Jordan, Paul 42 See Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Klee, 114.

Geometry in Modern Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 48 Klee, Diaries, #928.

82-83. 49 Carolyn Lanchner, "Klee in America," in Paul Klee: His Life and Work (New

43 For further discussion of this issue see Virginia Spate, Orphism: The Evolution York: Museum of Modern Art, 1987), 84. Paul Klee's friend and interpreter,

of Non-Figurative Painting in Paris, 1910-1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, Grohmann, concurred. See Will Grohmann, Paul Klee (New York: Harry 1979). N. Abrams, 1955), 214. 44 Paul Klee, "Die Ausstellung des Modernen Bundes im Kunsthaus Zurich," 50 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward

Die Alpen 6 (Aug. 1912), cited in Jordan, Paul Klee, 58-59. Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962) (hereafter cited as 8T). ist specialization of time and denied its detachment from expe- A July 1924 lecture, "The Concept of Time," briefly specified:

rience. Although Bergson fails, Heidegger claims, rendering his 190 own account of c/uree "untenable," the accounts remain "valu- Space is nothing in itself; there is no absolute able because they manifest a philosophical effort to surpass the space. It exists by way of the bodies and en-

traditional concept of time" and the tendency to base its analyses ergies contained in it. (An old proposition of

5 ' on the ontic presence of the now. Aristotle's) [s/c] Time too is nothing. It persists

Heidegger further acknowledges Aristotle's definition of time's merely as a consequence of the events taking

circularity, albeit by denying its formal or tautological failure in place in it. There is no absolute space and no

noting its hermeneutic status: "As Aristotle says in his interpreta- absolute simultaneity either. In seeing the de-

tion, time can be interpreted only if it is understood by way of time, structive side of this theory, one readily over- 52 that is by way of original time." Aristotle's definition of time as looks what is positive about it, namely, that it

the number of motion with respect to the before and after, attests demonstrates precisely the invariability, with

to such originality, Heidegger claims. It does so, first of all, by respect to arbitrary transformation, of those

articulating time as a phenomenon articulated, that is oriented, by equations describing natural processes. Time 53 the before and after, a horizonal phenomenon. But Aristotle is is that within which events take place. This is

not guilty of Bergson's charge; he does not think of time spatially. what Aristotle has already seen, in the context

The countable "now" through which time becomes articulated of the fundamental kind of Being pertaining to

as present or past or before and after emerges only out of such natural being: change, change of place, loco- 58 oriented horizons. Rather than a simple linear series of "nows" motion.

there is a becoming and an essential difference or slipping-away

to the now: inherently a "just then," "not now," "not yet," and Referencing Hermann Weyl's 1923 influential book on relativ-

"no longer." Indeed this difference is crucial: "This constitutes its ity, Space-Time-Matter, Heidegger's Sophist lectures further note 54 always being now, its otherhood." In this very difference com- that this reencounters the problem of the continuum. Weyl had

ing into being and passing away are simultaneously present in been greatly influenced by Husserl while in Gottingen and a col-

the now. While countable, the now is not a limit, not an ontically league of Einstein's in Zurich. A decade previously Weyl had writ-

fixed point, but a transition; the consequence is that the now is "a ten a book on the continuum referencing Husserl's time-analyses 55 59 continuum of the flux of time." The now emerges from an original in its culminating argument. The Sophist lectures' own reference 56 temporality through which it becomes countable. to Weyl almost remind one of Husserl's Galileo analysis in The

Heidegger's considerations regarding the continuing rel- Crisis of the European Sciences that traces modern science's pro-

evance of Aristotle and Bergson may not end here. In his 1924- gressive technical detachment from the lifeworld. The latter was

25 Sophist lectures, Heidegger claimed that Einstein's physics too apparently precipitated after a reported visit from Alexander

involved a certain return to Aristotle. As anachronistic as this might Koyre, another member of the Gottingen circle, who had played

sound, one might recall Thomas Kuhn's claim that in some ways a similar role in importing Bergson some twenty years earlier after

(though not all) Einstein's physics is closer to Aristotle's than that of a stay in Paris. Regardless, it is important to recall, in both cases, 57 either of them is to Newton's. Heidegger apparently concurred. that scientific truth is not being contested. And this is perfectly cor-

rect. As has been noted, the relativity of the new theory, chiefly

a "relativity of simultaneity," is "one of the most solidly verified 51 Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. 60 in entire lec- Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 232. theories the range of physics." Again, Heidegger's

Heidegger's evaluation elsewhere is perhaps even more positive: "Bergson ture at this point is not about scientific truth but the interpretation

first worked out the connection between a derived and an original time" of its concomitant ontologies or transcendental "residue," to use (The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, trans. Michael Heim [Bloomington: 61 Indiana University Press, 1992], 203). the Husserlian term that Weyl invokes. 52 Heidegger, Problems of Phenomenology, 241. While it has become c/e rigueur to confront Heidegger and 53 Ibid., 240. Ernst Cassirer at this point, we should pause to note their striking 54 Ibid., 248.

55 Ibid., 249.

56 Hence Being and Time will claim, "the expression 'temporality' does

not signify what one understands by 'time' when one talks about 'space 58 Martin Heidegger, The Concept of Time, trans. William McNeill (Oxford: and time'" (Heidegger, BT, 418). Nevertheless, the notion of such an Blackwell, 1992), 3E. This heuristic differentiation of the nothingness of time

Urtemporality notwithstanding, granted his conception of In-der-Welt-sein, is clearly already close to the role of Dos nichts that will invoke Carnap's

Heidegger also declared: "Nevertheless, Dasein must be called 'temporal' ire. Moreover, this articulation of time through "the hermeneutical possibility

in the sense of Being 'in time.' Even without a developed historiology, of the 'not'" remains a continuing presence in Heidegger's treatment, as

factical Dasein needs and uses a calendar and a clock" (ibid., 429). This, evidenced from the 1962 On Time and Being: "Time is not. It gives time. The

too, is part of its facticity and why, as Weyl noted, all measuring involves giving that gives time is determined by denying and withholding nearness"

relativity. See Hermann Weyl, Space-Time-Matter, trans. Henry L. Brose (On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh [New York: Harper and Row,

(London: Methuen, 1922), 9. For further discussion of Heidegger and 1972], 16). Cassirer's mutual relation to Weyl see my "In Schelling's Shadow: Cassirer, 59 Weyl, Continuum, 10.

Heidegger, the Narratives of Art and the Art of Narrative," Cassirer Studies 60 Ernan McMullin, cited in Jammer, Concepts of Simultaneity, 6. 4 (forthcoming). 61 Weyl, Continuum, 94; Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure

57 Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. (Chicago: Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: Book 1, trans. Fred University of Chicago Press, 1970), 206-207. Kersten (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1982), 63 (hereafter cited as IPP). s ]

concurrence. Cassirer too acknowledged the horizons of the ratio- from its objectified achievements (the "I think" that accompanies nal and the focus imaginariu that underwrites its claims: "we can the achieved representation)—the counted now—but arises from 70 never claim that this process has attained to the ultimate invariants within the critical differentiation, the measure of temporalization . of experience, which would then replace the immutable facticity Put otherwise, this differentiation of time is itself internally heuristic. of 'things'; we can never grasp these invariants with our hands so Heidegger (again following Weyl) further noted that in this 62 to speak ." Cassirer also cited Weyl's work on the continuum and recent reencounter with the problem of the continuum the notion his claim that the old explanation of number theory remains "too of a field becomes normative, again inherently denying that the narrow." Still, Weyl insisted on the link to consciousness and even problem of the continuum is analytically resolvable; instead it

." 71 more primordially to time: "Time is the primitive form [die Urform must be grasped as something "prior to. ..analytic penetration

." 63 72 of the stream of consciousness The mathematical presentation Cassirer, too, explicitly cited Weyl on this point . But it is perhaps of time, belying the continual slipping-away of subjective time, is not without positive resonance on Heidegger's own ontological an achievement or projection outside ourselves. reconsideration of Aristotle. Being and Time's constant use of

It is equally striking that Heidegger does not simply insist on "feld" to articulate the complicated constitution of In-der-Welt-

life [ connecting mathematics to his account of the modes of factical sein, as an "equiprimordiality Gleichursprunglichkeit] of constitu- 64 here, indicative of the order of reasons operative in his argument . tive items" irreducible to a primordial foundation, perhaps latently

Such a connection had been made by his student, Oskar Becker. further echoes this confluence between Aristotle and Einstein he 73 Cassirer rigorously objected to this view, as he did to Heidegger's has in mind . account of fundamental ontology at Davos, precisely because it If Klee's work manifests a similarity at this point, the issue is not lacked any account of objectivity. Moreover, the phenomenologi- simply one of content, but also concerns the complex construc- cal account was unnecessary: Cassirer claimed that mathematics tion accompanying the articulation of the experience of facticity; could be theorized without such reference to "the experience of indeed Klee's polyphonic works' interwoven planes, lines, and the mathematician," since it required only reference to the "I think" color (in conjunction with the complex genesis he ascribed to the 65 of Kant's transcendental apperception . The disagreement here work of art) also attest to such "equiprimordial constitution." As seems to circulate around the issue of what Cassirer called "sub- has already become apparent, as Aristotle originally claimed:

74 jective achievement" and how such considerations contextualize "one cannot put together a line out of points ." Cassirer himself objectivization—again as Becker glossed it, around the issue of had identified such an Aristotelian conception with the phenom-

75 the mathematician's Selbstvergessenheit, perhaps even the math- enological continuum . 66 ematician's Verfallensein . But, as the insistence upon the positive Still, as Heidegger noted, Aristotle himself already posed the accomplishment of relativity theory above indicates, the proximity critical question, one that will lead directly to Augustine's subjec-

." 76 of Weyl to Heidegger's analyses may also hold true—and as his tivization of time, "whether if soul did not exist time would exist 67 consequent Aristotle analysis further reveals . But for Heidegger, "subjectivization" seems the wrong term.

On Heidegger's construal of Aristotle's view, in any case, mathematical truths are extratemporal, not, initially, because they We see by the interpretation of "being in time" 68 are inauthentic but "because they are not in motion ." The mea- that time, as the embracing, as that in which suring of time itself reveals the extratemporal character of math- natural events occur, is, as it were, more ob- ematics. But as a consequence Heidegger does insist on the issue jective than all objects. On the other hand, we of "subjective achievement" (consistent with Being and Time): "the see also that it exists only if the soul exists. It is interpretation of intratemporality also tells us what can be intra- more objective than all objects and simultane-

." 69 temporal as well as, on the other hand, what it is extratemporal ously it is subjective, existing only if subjects 77 Without denying such objectification, indeed he insists on exist .

Einstein's positive accomplishment, Heidegger insists its status becomes radically apparent not by a transcendental deduction

70 It would not be hard to argue that such critical "measuring" of temporality

62 Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Vo I. 3: The Phenomenology remains at stake in the account of historical Kritik in Being and Time 2.5.

of Knowledge, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, See, for example, BT, 449. 1957), 475. 71 Martin Heidegger, Plato's Sophist, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and Andre

63 Weyl, Space-Time-Matter, 5. (This is a translation of the third edition to Schuwer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 80. which Heidegger's lectures are referred.) 72 Cassirer, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, 466.

64 Proof of such an interpretation can be evidenced in the fact that while the 73 Heidegger, BT, 170; Heidegger's emphasis. One can note further that

event of appropriation (Ereignis) or "worlding" is at stake throughout his Heidegger had related Kant's account of the constitutive structures of a

work, Heidegger's articulemes alter. priori intuition to Einstein. See his Logic: The Question of Truth, trans. Thomas 65 Cassirer, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, 404n. Sheehan (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 290. 66 Oskar Becker, Mathematische Existenz (Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1973), 320 74 Aristotle, Physics 231 a24. - 21 . 75 Ernst Cassirer, Substance and Function: And Einstein's Theory of Relativity, 67 Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), trans. trans. William Curtis Swabey and Marie Collins Swabey (Chicago: Open Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, Court, 1923), 452. He further contrasted the position with Poincare's "there 1999), 95. remains only the manifold, the unity has disappeared" (453). 68 Heidegger, Problems of Phenomenology, 253. 76 Aristotle, Physics 223a21.

69 Ibid.; Heidegger's emphasis. 77 Heidegger, Problems of Phenomenology, 254-55; Heidegger's emphasis. Such a consequence requires an interpretation of the belong- tic phenomenologies we have perhaps only analyzed a certain

ing together of subject and object, the complicated constitution surface effect, even in articulating an "optics" beyond aesthetic 192 of Being and Time's hermeneutic of In-der-Welt-sein with which and philosophical impressionism. It is true, as Klee put it: "time is 78 ." 85 Klee's work has been compared . Philosophically it amounted to an essential factor in the pictorial field So too in music: but it is

the claim that "the distinction between being and beings is tem- the deficiency in music that seems to be decisive. What Klee notes

." 79 poralized in the temporalizing of temporality But as such, as in the diary passage we are considering is the advance of the

measurable and ordinate as it might be, temporality could not graphic polyphonic work over the musical, precisely because it

be identified with such presentations. Critically, Weyl himself articulates not only a passage, or becoming but a certain history,

claimed, the essence of measuring requires this transcendental a certain "retrograde motion" or reference to a past, an "anima-

dimension, if only so that a system of coordinates be selected: tion" (perhaps a will or an instinct) and the horizons of a subject,

"That is why a theory of relativity is perforce always involved in a becoming inherent to the graphic line's very zigzag. Through

." 80 measurement But it also ultimately led him to claim, "the pair this retrograde motion, Klee claimed (like Heidegger in ultimately

of opposites, subjective absolute and objective relative contains denying Bergson's claim), time becomes spatial.

one the most fundamental epistemological insights which can be Now Husserl, who reportedly considered his own account

81 gleaned from science ." to be "the true Bergsonism," referred in this regard to the "dou-

Klee was no cubist in the end, any more than Heidegger, who, ble intentionally" of temporal consciousness; he understood its 86 it has been reported, condemned cubism for its complicity with intentional zigzag to form the mis en scene of phenomenology .

82 modern technology . Neither could rest easily with the antitheses Duration cannot be posited without being posited in a tempo-

of simple intuition or pure construction. One might also invoke ral context. In such a context the present now already contains

Weyl's demurrals here. As Cassirer noted, mathematics maintains its ("longitudinal or horizontal") past. In turn, the present inten- 87 an urge to totality. For Weyl, however, it reveals, as he put it in a tional ("traverse") reference already contains its reverse order .

later work, "that that desire can be fulfilled on one condition only, It belongs to the essence of the now that it be united with this

namely, that we are satisfied with the symbol and renounce the consciousness "in opposite" directions which are given "simul-

mystical error of expecting the transcendent ever to fall within the taneously": the present is posited with its past, the recollected

." 83 88 lighted circle of intuition The very choice of a coordinate sys- past, its present . In both regards, "Foreground is nothing with-

." 89 tem that had forced the issue of subjective measuring also limited out background This is how Heidegger, one of the editors of

the result. Quite literally, to use Jean Cavailles's terms, "the term Husserl's manuscripts on time, had understood Aristotle's account

'consciousness' does not admit of a univocity of application—no as oriented: to invoke the language of Being and Time, it involved

." 84 .'" 90 more than does the thing, as the unity which can be isolated "a remarkable 'relatedness back or forward In it, as Husserl

This amounts to the internal constructive limitations to the articula- expands, simultaneity is nothing without succession and succes-

91 tion or "measuring" of any transcendental phenomenology, one sion without simultaneity . However, Husserl (like Bergson) him-

affecting "phenomenologies" of various stripes, from Hegel to self often invoked music as the model of unity and iterable identity

Husserl onward. and thus the possibility of "a fulfilled continuum" of experienced 92 The objection might be made then that in focusing upon artis- time . But precisely here, apparently, is where Klee demurred in

assigning a retrograde motion to the graphic line as unattainable

78 Paul Ricoeur has rightly suggested that Heidegger's account here musically. overcomes the aporia between cosmic or natural time and experiential Such claims to the unities or harmonies of musical immanence time in the tradition, between Augustine and Aristotle, Kant, and Husserl. carried their own antinomies. It meant for Husserl (as for Einstein) He argues that the account still fails since it, too, remains incapable of

grounding natural time. We should wonder however whether his argument that cosmic time and phenomenological time must be strictly concerns (as did the differences at stake between Cassirer and Heidegger 93 distinguished . The question of their mutual relation denied, or Weyl) necessary or sufficient conditions at this point. See Paul Ricoeur,

Time and Narrative, trans. Kathleen Blarney and David Pellauer, vol. 3 Husserl declared, even an account of "metaphorical similarity."

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 91 ff. Such issues would 94 The transcendental earth does not move . Even so the unity pur- continue to overdetermine interpretations of Heidegger's temporal idealism

in Ricoeur's wake.

79 Heidegger, 87, 310. 85 Klee, The Thinking Eye, 503.

80 Weyl, Space-Time-Matter, 9. 86 Husserl's claim that his was the true Bergsonism was reported by Ingarden. 81 Hermann Weyl, Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science (1927), See Herbert Spieqelberq, The Phenomenological Movement (The Haque: trans. Olaf Helmer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949), 116. Nijhoff, 1984), 446n2. 82 See Heinrich Wiegand Petzet, Encounters and Dialogues with Martin 87 Edmund Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Heidegger, 1919- 1976, trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Chicago: Time, trans. John Barnet Brough (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991), 390ff. University of Chicago Press, 1993), 146. (hereafter cited as CIT).

83 Ibid., 26. 88 Ibid., 314-15.

84 Hence Cavailles's claim: a philosophy of consciousness inevitably 89 Ibid., 316. encounters a philosophy of the concept. The generating necessity of 90 Heidegger, 8T, 28.

phenomenology "is not the necessity of an activity but the necessity of 91 Husserl, CIT, 386.

a dialectic." But like the internal limitation that it articulates this dialectic 92 Husserl, IPP, 194.

also remains "phenomenological." See Jean Cavailles, "On Logic and the 93 Ibid., 193.

Theory of Science," in Phenomenology and the Natural Sciences, ed. J. 94 See Edmund Husserl, "Foundational Investigations of the Phenomenological

Kockelmans and T. Kisiel (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), Origin of the Spatiality of Nature: The Originary Ark, the Earth, Does Not

409. Move," trans. Fred Kersten and Leonard Lawlor in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, chased here was also problematic. While Husserl appealed to an account of the Kantian a priori by jettisoning its experien-

105 the immanence of the reflective regard, the proposed unity of tial link. Husserl, Weyl, and Heidegger after them (like Klee)

the horizons out of which it emerged was again (as in the case retained the link to intuition, to a residue that cannot be simply 95 193 of Cassirer's claims about science) a Kantian idea. We might extensionally replaced. As Klee put it, "We construct and keep on

question whether, against the regulative status of this claim, the constructing, yet intuition is a good thing. You can do a good deal 06 mathematical model (and the mathematical continuum of constitu- without it, but not everything."'

tive^ continuous "nows") still structured Husserl's models, whether, The graphic line already contains the "retrograde motion"

to use Desanti's terms, the fopos of phenomenology was not that any conception of the infinitesimal of the simple constructed 96 intrinsically "utopian." Merleau-Ponty called Husserl's model a point forecloses. Like the perception of a real object, it has its

107 "positivist projection," claiming (again in reference to Heidegger) "slipping away," its "reverse side as background." Here is that we must pass beyond the identity of the thing to thing as dif- where Heidegger declared that the heuristic identity of the now is

97 108 ference. Like the musical work of art in need of a retrograde wholly difference and differentiation. Hence, the experienced

motion, the ego cannot presuppose such immanence; it must be now, the now as a continuum of the flux is understood not as

successively constructed, an identity that is drawn together only one of immanent experience but of transcendence, of an origi- 98 "at a distance." To use Merleau-Ponty's Proustian figure: "Thus nal temporality in which it is "embraced" (to use Husserl's term,

Iuv I function by construction. I am installed on a pyramid of time "founded") and out of which it is articulated, measured. Here is 99 which has been me." Rather than simply an egological account where Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty had broken with the prior-

phenomenology would require further account of the event of ity granted by Husserl to immanence. The articulation of the tem-

100 its emergence, precisely a "cosmology of the visible." Even porality (the logos of phenomenology) that embraces all things

Husserl's account, barring such a link to facticity, tacitly admit- (intratemporal and extratemporal) cannot be reduced to one of

ted the passage beyond immanence: reflection always emerges its dimensions, the simple serial or optic duration of the present.

101 from a "horizon of unregarded mental processes." To reinvoke Temporality, to use Klee's terms, is one of those elements that "ren-

Weyl's figure, the shadow that we cannot jump over is that time ders visible." And, on Heidegger's interpretation, missing this was

can "never" be fully reduced, given to a "single pure regard" or not only Bergson's (or even Husserl's) mistake, but the philosophi-

glance; it is always articulated from a standpoint, a single adum- cal tradition's writ large.

102 bration or shadowing-off Abschattung But what is it that hap- Even if the measured were timeless, the measuring is not. As ( ).

pens then in the retrograde motion of Klee's graphic line, that Heidegger cited Count York, we are "historically determined,

110 somehow conjoins immanence and transcendence, the regard just as physics knows we are cosmically determined." Weyl's

and the unregarded, even cosmic and phenomenological time invocation of the (almost Nietzschean) shadow that one cannot

in one event? jump over seems to concur. Later Heidegger will invoke this same

In the first place, we should be reminded of Kant: one cannot Nietzschean shadow as precisely the shadow that traditional

represent a line without drawing it, again an experience belying metaphysics sought to eradicate. But even if Heidegger's Being

103 its representation as a set of points. It was a question again of and Time sought to resolve the issue in a Dasein analysis, it did

a priori (subjective) intuition, its temporal genesis. Here however so only by turning phenomenology interpretive. But how does this

Kant in effect had bequeathed a mixed message to his follow- become manifest in Klee's account?

104 ers. Cassirer (and the logical positivists) had sought to develop To illustrate this retrograde motion, Klee uses a telling example

in a 1917 diary entry, recalling the mirror image Spiegelbild in ( )

trolley. Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology, ed. Leonard Lawlor and Bettina the windows of the moving

Bergo (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2002), 117-31. In making

these strict distinctions, in mutually claiming to possess the object exclusively

To illustrate the retrograde motion which I am in advance, Merleau-Ponty declared that Husserl and Einstein form the

limit of classical reason (Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary [Evanston: thinking up for music, I remember the mirror

Northwestern University Press, 192). For further discussion of this 1964], image in the windows of the moving trolley. issue see my "Notes on Merleau-Ponty and Bachelard," in Phenomenology,

Institution, and History: Writings After Merleau-Ponty 2 (London: Continuum, 2009), 78-97. 43-44. For a discussion of the hermeneutic reception of Kant's "mixed

95 Husserl, IPP, 197. message" see my Tradition(s) 2: Hermeneutics, Ethics, and the Dispensation

96 Jean-Toussaint Desanti, Reflexions sur le temps (Paris: Grasset, 1992), 156. of the Good (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 226ff.

For Desanti, Husserl's account thus remains "speculative." 105 Cassirer however retained the role of transcendental intuition for

97 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis transcendental methodology. See Cassirer, Substance and Function, 451 n.

(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 195, 231. Cassirer still here reflects Weyl's claim that the choice of a coordinate 98 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith, system required the residuum of transcendental experience.

rev. Forrest Williams (New York: Humanities Press, 1962), 408. 106 Klee, The Thinking Eye, 69. 99 Merleau-Ponty, Signs, 14; Perception, 393. 107 Husserl, CIT, 316. 100 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible, 265. 108 Heidegger, Problems of Phenomenology, 248. We should add that

101 Husserl, IPP, 197. here is where time became paradigmatic for the constructions (and

102 Ibid., 193, 197. deconstructions) of the phenomenological subject: to use Merleau-Ponty's

103 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New terms, its premier model (le premier modele (Perception, ) 352). York: MacMillan, 1973), 167 (B 154). 109 Heidegger, BT, 41 8.

104 Here I follow J. Alberto Coffa, The Semantic Tradition from Kant to Carnap: 110 Ibid., 453. This of course does not entail that the "determinations" of To the Vienna Station (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), physics and those of history are the same. .

Delaunay strove to shift the accent in art onto articulates, if you will, the precosmic genesis of Being-in-the-World.

the time element, after the fashion of a fugue, And, the continuum that results not only articulates the trace (the 194 by choosing formats that could not be encom- "spread") of its past (the "just now") but its finitude bears witness ,,, passed in one glance. to the transcendence and dissonance, the sublime in its midst; it

reveals to use Klee's terms, a fragmented event where "we have

115 Such a Spiegelbild again articulates a zigzag or Wechsel and the parts but not the whole." Klee even claims that the spatiality

articulates a transcendence, an experience unencompassable by of the picture is similarly oriented between (simultaneous) horizons:

a glance or a single regard. Both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty the "upward drive operates only as a corollary to the downward

116 will not be far off. Heidegger will speak similarly of the world as pull (the attraction of the earth)." But what does this Wechsel

11 " Spielrau m: Merleau-Ponty of the reversibility that lines it. Here between the constructive and the symbolic entail for Klee?

the "retrograde" truly entails its reverse side as background; iden- As close as Klee was to the constructionist aesthetic theories

tity arises only through an internal difference or differentiation, an of the Bauhaus he never fully complied with them. No more than

event of appropriation Ereignisj of equiprimoridal constitution: he was ultimately swayed by the destructions and constructions of (

its "just now" always a "present/past" of an "earlier/later." cubism. He remained everywhere interested in science and inte-

The temporality of the line further articulates the retrograde grated a wide variety of scientific theories into his art, including

motion, the Wechsel of time itself, of production and reception, statics and dynamics, electromagnetic phenomena, plant anat-

protention and retention: omy, cell structure and growth, weather patterns, and geologi-

cal change, for example. Yet even though there is evidence that

A linear figure takes time, and one must travel Einstein's work was known by members of the Bauhaus (and that

receptively the same road as one has taken Einstein was one of its supporters against its political opponents)

productively.... A line contains energies that there is no ultimate evidence that Klee depended on Einstein's

manifest themselves by cutting and by consum- physics or even knew them. Indeed it is perhaps more fitting to

in ing time [ schneidend und zeitraubend ]. This think of Carnap lecturing (as he did October 1929) on Einstein

gives the line a mutual relation to imaginary at the Bauhaus and where, not incidentally, he initially rehearsed

117 space [e/ne Wechselseitige Beziehung zum his objections to Heidegger's "mystic" metaphysics.

imaginaren Raum]. 113 Instead of relying upon the science Carnap privileged, Klee

was more interested in its meaning or "residue," both in grasping

Through such "cutting" the differentiated picture plane the advance of modern science and its symbolic effect, grasp-

114 acquires both an imaginary depth and a symbolic dimension. It ing both the construction and its "retrograde" effect or historicity.

Hence, again, the tensions of his synthesis emerge. Klee's notion

111 Klee, Diaries, #1081. of the symbol certainly has romantic overtones even while based 112 See Heidegger, 87, 141; Merleau-Ponty, The Visible, 147ff; cf. Merleau- in the synthesis of subjective and objective space and the integra- Ponty, Perception, 408. Later Heidegger will return to this interplay at stake

in time (On Time and Being, 15). Like Delaunay, Merleau-Ponty appealed tion of modern science. No more than Heidegger was attempt-

to Leonardo's discussion of simultaneity in constructing his account of ing to replace physics with his interpretation of phenomenology reversibility. See Notes de cours, 1959- 1961, ed. Stephanie Menase was Klee attempting to trump science with art or the aesthetic. (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), 175ff.

113 Klee, The Thinking Eye, 340. Phenomenological time is not the ultimate truth of time any more

114 Indeed, such symbolic "cutting" might be aptly construed in Lacanian than relativity theory's well-confirmed account of simultaneity overtones. Accordingly, Zizek wondered, with respect to Heidegger, whether the account of In-der-Welt-sein had confronted the (Kantian) exhausts its experience (or intelligibility). Here even Heidegger

antinomies that overdetermine his cosmology; he argued that such and Cassirer were in concurrence. Heidegger aptly claimed antimonies "undermine the very notion of cosmos as a whole of the that Aristotle and Einstein came at the measuring at stake from universe, as a meaningful hermeneutic totality of surroundings, as a life- 118 world in which a historical people dwells." See Slavoj Zizek, The Ticklish "opposite directions." Cassirer himself, looking straight at Weyl,

Subject (London: Verso, 1 999), 50. For Zizek, this totalization is undercut by Kant's element of the sublime, even the monstrous, that Heidegger's cosmic

image represses from his reading of Kant. Zizek affirmed Heidegger's the libidinal scene nor to ultimately know it but instead to to reveal or figure

emphasis upon transcendental imagination as "fully justified in his ferocious it. For a similar analysis with respect to Klee see Jean-Francois Lyotard,

aversion to Cassirer's reading of Kant during their famous Davos debate in Discourse, Figure, trans. Anthony Hudek and Mary Lydon (Minneapolis:

1929" (27). Yet, uncannily, Zizek's objection still remained proximate to University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 205-232. Cassirer, who argued that Kant's antinomies instead authorized an account 115 Klee, The Thinking Eye, 95.

of transcendental freedom—purportedly also insufficiently emphasized in 116 Ibid., 44.

Heidegger's account. Without simply denying either of these antinomial 117 For the details here see Sara Lynn Henry, "Paul Klee's Pictorial Mechanics

claims (ultimately claims regarding ontotheology or cosmotheology), I from Physics to the Picture Plane," Bruckmanns Pantheon 47 (1989):

have reemphasized the oscillation or zigzag at stake in the transcendental 164n. Also see Peter Galison, "Aufbau/Bauhaus: Logical Positivism and imagination. Contra Zizek, here the event of appropriation belies Architectural Modernism," Critical Inquiry 16 (1990): 709-752. Granted immanent totalization, articulating an oscillation Heidegger linked both the rapprochement that occurred between Hannes Meyer and the later

to transcendence and ekstasis, and all three to the Worlding (We/fef) of Dessau Bauhaus with the logical positivists, Feigl and Carnap, Klee's

the world. See Heidegger, Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, 209. This attempt to synthesize construction and intuition clearly takes him in different

oscillation also renders the "opening" of the work of art, articulating its directions, bringing him closer to Heidegger and Weyl. As I will detail

distance from desire without simply surpassing it. The work of art would further elsewhere, Carnap, accordingly, aligned Klee with what he termed

thus neither escape desire (or nature) nor subsume it before consciousness, Husserl's "metaphysics of consciousness."

representation, and determinate judgment: it neither "intends" to escape 1 1 8 Heidegger, Plato's Sophist, 41 ,

claimed that the question as to which form of knowledge, the To this corresponds a simultaneous union of

phenomenological or the physical "expresses the true reality has forms, movement and countermovement, or to

119 lost fundamentally for us all definite meaning." In the end, he put it naively, of objective contrasts (the use of 195 claimed, both Bergson and Newton were "conceptual fictions." disjunct color contrasts, as by Delaunay). Ev-

What is perhaps as decisive as their dispute is capturing the pas- ery energy requires its complement to bring

sage or concurrence between Heidegger and Cassirer. itself to rest outside the field of force. Abstract

"Algebraic, geometrical, and mechanical problems are steps formal elements are put together like numbers

in our education towards the essential, towards the functional and letters to make concrete beings or abstract

as opposed to the impressional. We learn to see what flows things; in the end a formal cosmos is achieved, 120 beneath." Clearly Klee, too, was no positivist: "Mathematics so much like the Creation that a mere breath

128 and physics provide a lever in the form of rules to be observed suffices to transform religion into act.

121 or contradicted." Or: "In art the essential is to create movement

according to rules, to create deviations while bearing the rules in Delaunay's objective contrasts provide a formal cosmos that

122 mind." The same zigzag by which he articulated the rhythmics opens up the depths of artistic possibility. It facilitates an initial

of his graphic line was true of the Wechsel conceptualized in his step involving "the liberation of the elements, their arrangement in

art in general. It was a similar zigzag between concept and intu- subsidiary groups, simultaneous destruction and construction to-

ition by which Husserl had articulated phenomenological possibil- wards the whole, pictorial polyphony, the creation of rest through

ity; to use Klee's terms from the diary entry we have considered: the equipoise of motion." These are indeed characteristics of the

123 "Everything we see is a proposal, an expedient." Indeed he works of Delaunay that Klee had seen and discussed. But he im- writes, "I state a priori formulas for men, beasts, plants, stones mediately adds: "All these are lofty aspects of the question of

124 and the elements, and for all whirling forces." Commentators form, crucial to formal wisdom; but they are not yet art in the

129 have pointed out the bridge between Klee and the zigzag of highest sphere." The same can be claimed for Delaunay's in-

125 Husserl's epoche. At the same time, he remains close to Weyl's corporation of time, still ontic, adopted to the serial appearance

130 epistemological disjunct concerning the subjective-absolute and of the object, i.e. optic. Instead Klee's truth "remains invisible,

objective-relative with its renunciation of the transcendental illu- beneath the surface." Beyond the visual it explores the precosmic

sion of expecting the transcendent to fall within the lighted circle depths and the shadows of the imaginary and its extension into

of intuition. Instead recourse must be made to symbolic construc- the transcendent. Here like the shadow of Weyl's ineliminable re-

126 tion. As Klee put it: "We must work our way back to unity." And siduum or Abschattung of consciousness, beyond the philosophers this very nonromantic truth is also at work in Klee's symbol and of form and Delaunay's formal cosmos with its emphasis on light,

131 his symbolic construction of the picture plane, clearly one with Klee affirms: "the graphic world consists of light and shadow."

formal implications. As Weyl had put it, "Intuition is not blissful As was noted at the outset, Klee's symbolic quest had been

repose never to be broken, it is driven on toward the dialectic and integrated with a rich thought of the philosophers of forms. As

]27 adventure of cognition [Erkenntis]." the July 1917 diary entry states: "Philosophy, so they say, has a

Klee's famous 1918 "Creative Credo" also closes by making taste for art; at the beginning I was amazed at how much they

132 reference to Delaunay as he did in July 1917, further articulating saw." What "the philosophers of form" left out was precisely the complex synthesis or "cutting" at stake in his work: what Klee referred to as Weltanschauung, what Heidegger called

the "worlding" of the world. In this they, too, remained optical:

"The world was my subject, even though it was not the visible

133 119 Cassirer, Substance and Function, 454. world." What their forms left out—and why Klee's commentators 120 Klee, The Thinking Eye, 69. kept connecting him with Heidegger—was the zigzag and sym- 121 Ibid.

122 Ibid., 152. bolic "cutting" or articulation out of which such "worlding" rises: 123 Klee, Diaries, #1081. "But we investigate the formal for the sake of expression." Put 124 Ibid., #1008. otherwise, what they missed was the zigzag of construction, the 125 See Albert Cook, "The Sign in Klee," Word and Image 2, no. 4 (Oct.- 134 Dec. 1986): 364. Cook argues, moreover, that such "bracketing" allows work of art's Wechselkonstruktion.

Klee both to surpass the optics of cubism and (unlike Picasso's interest

in primitivism) to triumph over myth (374). For Husserl's analysis of the

"zigzag" between concept and intuition see Logical Investigations Volume 128 Klee, The Thinking Eye, 79. Klee's references to creation have often

1 trans. J. N. Findlay (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), 260. provoked parallels with Schelling. See, for example, Henri Maldiney,

Artistically, Klee's conceptual emphasis upon the pure possibilities of the Regard, Parole, Espace (Lausanne: Editions I'Age d'Homme, 1994), 173-

graphic line echoes (and more explicitly reflects) Wilhelm Worringer's 207.

account of the "the purely abstract" or inorganic "gothic" line, no longer 129 Ibid.

dependent on the object—and itself modeled on the abstract or essential 130 Compare Henderson, The Fourth Dimension, 91: "Time in Cubist painting

expressive possibilities, the Linienspiel or rhythmic zigzag of sketching. See plays only a supporting role, allowing the artist or geometer to accomplish

Wilhelm Worringer, Form Problems of the Gothic (New York: G. E. Stechert, the physical or mental movement necessary to form an idea of an object's

1918), 46. The difference, as Lyotard notes, is that the abstraction inherent total dimensionality."

to the gothic line remained regulated by a determinate possibility and 131 Klee, Diaries, #1081.

Script(ure). See Discourse, Figure, 439n. 132 Ibid.

126 Klee, The Thinking Eye, 153. 133 Ibid.

127 Weyl, Mathematics and Natural Science, 26. 134 The term Wechselkonstruktion is Friedrich Schlegel's. Like others, I have ]37 the "junctures" or chapters of his Beitrage. But this means in

turn that such a structure never rises beyond interpretation; the

possible weavings of its narrative remain always multiple. This

is perhaps what Jean-Francois Lyotard meant in seeing in Klee's

138 magic squares the end of grand narrative. And this is perhaps

what authors like Cassirer or Scheler, Sartre or Merleau-Ponty,

Stein or Levinas meant in contesting the details of Heidegger's

account and arguing for alternatives. But, of course, no less than

Heidegger later sought to emend his account—and as has been

seen, he did not bring the narratives of care, Being-toward-Death

and Dasein's Verfallensein into consideration in his initial discus-

sion of the formal measurement of time. He not only exhibited

thereby the order of reasons, the articulation (or "measuring") of

time within the part-whole relations inherent to the rational, but he

also recognized explicitly that such multiplicity was not a threat:

"This multiplicity of possible interpretation does not discredit strict-

139 ness of the thought content." What is almost forgotten is that

Fig. 2: Paul Klee, Angel's Care Engelshut 1931/54. Chalk on paper ( ), the articulemes such as care that resulted and came to be almost on cardboard, 19.6 x 22.7 cm, Rheinisches Bildarchiv Koln, RBA © staunchly (and at times infamously) iconic in this regard were 188 640. always part of a "preparatory" venture, a provisional moment

in the analysis undertaken by Heidegger to grasp the meaning

140 Geelhaar notes that the differential of polyphonic space of Being. But their proximity to Klee doubtless reveals again involved a differential of simultaneity, of different levels, planes, the irony at stake. As Geelhaar again observes, such polyphonic

135 and themes. This architectonics became explicit in works such structures noted above found their way into some of Klee's own as Polyphony of Surfaces and Lines polyphon-bewegtesj iconic works. Klee's works, such as his angels, continued to be ( (1930) or Polyphonic Architecture polyphone Architektur (1930; especially provocative for his philosophical interpreters, from ( )

141 plate 62), and Swinging, Polyphonic (and in Complementary Walter Benjamin onward. But they also appear not far from

Repetition) Schwingendes polyphon (und in complementarer the articulemes for Heidegger's account where, for example, [ ,

Wiederholung)] (1931). Moreover it provided a formal space they appear even in a polyphonic series devoted to the "care" of

142 whose syntactic multiplicity was capable of adoption and angels Angel's Care ( Engelshut fig. ( ) ) (1931; 2). 136 semantic transformation. We have noted its formal proximity to Heidegger's equiprimoridial constitution that undertakes the analysis of Dasein's Being-in-the-world by a kind of zigzag between the elements of its composition. Articulated through the 137 Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, 56. Urform of primordial temporality the analysis remained herme- 138 Jean-Francois Lyotard, "Adorno as the Devil," Telos 19 (Spring 1974): 137. neutic: neither axiomatic nor foundational. Such a hermeneutic 139 Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, trans. Fred D. Wieck and J.

Glen Gray (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 7. For further discussion does not attempt to leap over the shadow of its own facticity but of this issue see my "Abysses," in Extensions: Essays on Interpretation, articulates its temporal "embrace" through the backward and for- Rationality, and the Closure of Modernism (Albany: State University of

Press, 25-46. ward motion inherent to time itself. Like Delaunay, it is not acci- New York 1992), As previously noted, Heidegger himself

found the details of Klee's theoretical writings too neo-Kantian. I have dental that Heidegger would invoke the fugue as a model for suggested elsewhere that they assist us in making explicit the construction

of Heidegger's own account. I note finally at this point that Heidegger understood himself to be transforming Husserl's account of the logic of

argued for its importance for Heidegger—and Klee. See my Crescent Moon parts and wholes. See 8 T, 494n. One should not neglect Heidegger's later over the Rational. claim that the attempt to "derive" space from primordial temporality was

135 Geelhaar, Klee and the Bauhaus, 129-31. Geelhaar points out the "untenable" (On Time and Being, 10). But as has become evident (and

simultaneous outline and use of planes of Little Fool in a Trance ( Kleiner Narr as Heidegger will later state explicitly), the very model of equiprimordial

in Trance (169-71 that in turn served as model for two painted constitution belies foundationalism (On Time and Being, 32). Hence, unlike ) (1927) )

versions of Figurine: The Jester Figurine : der Narr and, two years Husserl's gloss on the founding or what Heidegger calls the "embracing" ( ) (1927)

later, Fool in a Trance (Narr in Trance reemerging finally in Steamer of time (8T, 41 the temporality of Dasein's In-der-Welt-sein in this sense is ) (1929), 8),

and Sailing Boats (Dampfer und Segelboote) (1931) and in the series already "cosmic." It is in this regard that "the belonging-together of being

devoted to Engelshut referred to below. To such syntactic considerations we and time," or what he called throughout Ereigni s, sustains the claim that

might add further semantic or iconographic transformations. For example "true time is four-dimensional" (On Time and Being, 19).

such architectural themes at stake in Cosmic and Earthly Time (1927) are 140 Heidegger, 8T, 64-65; cf. On Time and Being, 34.

also close by in the famous The Limits of Reason (Grenzen des Verstandes) 141 Neither Klee nor his interpreters avoided the daemonic implications.

(1927) produced not long after and still at stake in Polyphonic Architecture Indeed Klee's Fool in a Trance (1929) is often seen to be paradigmatic that articulates the "ontic" city outline through polyphonic dimensionality. of the polyphonic. See my "To Sketch an Essence: Schematic Thoughts on

136 Compare Klee's "Creative Credo": "Through such enrichment of the formal Paul Klee and the Image of the Daemonic," Research in Phenomenology 41 symphony the possibilities of variation, and with them the ideal expressive (2011): 253-75. possibilities, become innumerable" (Klee, The Thinking Eye, 78 [translation 142 Geelhaar, Klee and the Bauhaus, 137-39. altered]). Plates Note to reader: Klee numbered most of his works consecutively within each year. These numbers are in the captions for figures within essays and plates, following the year of creation. Plates in the catalogue are arranged to correspond to the exhibition's sections:

The Artist's Dialogue with Nature (1 -9); Genesis and the Primal Ground of Creation (10- 14); Movement, Flight, and the Balance of

Forces (15-25); Images and the Imaginary (26-34); Word and Music in Painting (35-40); The Drama of Existence (41 -45); The

Failure of Politics (46-54); and Artist and Philosopher (55-66). 199

1 . Green Terrain grunes Gelande), 1938/117 ( Oil and watercolor on primed cardboard, 37.5 x 50.5 cm

Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern

Livia Klee Donation, SLK B 72 200

2 . Wall Plant (Mauerpflanze), 1922/153 Watercolor and pen on paper on cardboard, 25.8 x 30.2 cm

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Seth K. Sweetser Residuary Fund, 64.526

3 . Insects Insecten 1919/144 ( ), Lithograph and watercolor on paper, 20 x 15.2 cm Harvard Art Museums/Busch-Reisinger Museum

Bequest of Betty Bartlett McAndrew, 1986.488 202

4 . Perception of on Animal ( Erkenntnis eines Tieres), 1925/190 Pen on paper on cardboard, 32.5 x 22.2 cm Harvard Art Museums/Busch-Reisinger Museum Association Fund, BR48.129 203

5. The Scales of Twilight ( Die Waage der Dammerung), 1921/134 Oil transfer drawing and watercolor on paper on cardboard, 44.5 x 29.4 cm

Private collection 7

204

6 . Agricultural Experimental Layout for Late Fall ( Agricultur Versuchs anlage fur den Spatherbst), 1922/13

Pen and watercolor on paper on cardboard, 1 8.6 x 30.1 cm

Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, ME

Gift of Jere Abbott, 1970.016 205

£ 7 " }

7. Aliup ( aliup ), 1931/177 Watercolor and pencil on paper on cardboard, 47.9 x 31.4 cm

Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA

Gift of the estate of Mrs. Sigmund Kunstadter (Maxine Weill, Class of 1924), SC 1978.56.1 07 206

8 . Lote Evening Looking Out of the Woods (Spot Abends ous dem Wold geblickt), 1937/34 Oil and colored paste on paper on cardboard, 42.5 x 46.5 cm

Saint Louis Art Museum Museum purchase, 119:1947 207

9 . Little Tree (Baumchen), 1935/147

Pen on paper on cardboard, 21.1 x 1 8.5 cm

Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern PKSZ 1226 208

10 . Collection of Doves ( Tauben Sammlung), 1939/72 Chalk on paper on cardboard, 29.8 x 20.9 cm

Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern PKS Z 1439 2

209

11 ( Composition with Symbols ( Composition mit Symbolen), . 1917/140 ) Pen and watercolor on paper on cardboard, 15.3 x 13.4 cm Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA

Gift of Rosalind Schang Swanson (Class of 1 943), 1 992.1 210

12 . Both of Them ( die Beiden), 1930/79 Pen on paper on cardboard, 20.3 x 14.6 cm

Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA

Purchased with the gift of Priscilla Cunningham (Class of 1958), SC 1977.18 211

13 . Collection of Figurines Figurinensammlung 1926/248 ( ), Oil on canvas on cardboard, 26.4 x 24.4 cm

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY

The Berggruen Klee Collection, 1984.315.47 212

14. Uneven Flight (unebene Flucht), 1939/741 Pencil on paper on cardboard, 27 x 21.5 cm

Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern PKS Z 1818 213

15 . Hardly Still Walking, Not Yet Flying (geht kaum mehr, fliegt noch nicht), 1927/163 Pen on paper on cardboard, 41.5 x 30.5 cm Harvard Art Museums/Busch-Reisinger Museum

Loan from Jean C. Evans, 7.BR80 Z

214

#/} /

16 . Superior Bird ( hoherer Vogel), 1940/73 Chalk on paper on cardboard, 29.5 x 20.9 cm

Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern PKS 2103 215

\ K V £

17. Waterbirds (Wasservogel), 1939/771 Colored paste and pencil on paper on cardboard, 27 x 21.4 cm

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Otis Norcross Fund, 56.105

18 . From Gliding to Rising ( von Gleiten zu Steigen), 1923/89 Oil transfer and watercolor on paper on cardboard, 35.6 x 51 .7 cm Harvard Art Museums/Busch-Reisinger Museum

Bequest of Virginia H. Deknatel in memory of Wilhelm Koehler, 2009.3 217

19 . The Fish (Der Fisch), 1918/185 Pen on paper on cardboard, 10.6 x 21.9 cm

Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern PKS Z 391 20 . Tightrope Walker (Seiltanzer), 1923/138 Lithograph, 44 x 27.9 cm Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA

Museum purchase with funds provided by Wellesley College Friends of Art, 2005.146 219

/1/3 to it 9 c uc./^e

21 . Suicide on the Bridge {Selbstmorder auf der Brucke), 1913/100

Pen on paper on cardboard, 15.8 x 1 1 .5 cm Harvard Art Museums/Busch-Reisinger Museum

Bequest of Betty Bartlett McAndrew, 1986.468 7

220

22 . Entertainer in April ( Gaukler im April), 1928/19 Etching, 19 x 19.5 cm Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum William M. Prichard Fund, M 12842 221

23 . Entertainer Festival Gaukler-fest 1932/169 ( ), Pen on paper on cardboard, 50 x 61 cm Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum

Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Alfred Jaretzki, Jr., 1962.194 222

lu'ie ia, 4 'V- F

24 . Group in Motion ( bewegte Gruppe), 1930/74

Pen on paper on cardboard, 1 2.2 x 1 2.2 cm Harvard Art Museums/Busch-Reisinger Museum

Anonymous gift in memory of W. R. Koehler, BR60.29 223

/ )^ '>T /

25 . Flight (Flucht), 1940/121

Pen on paper on cardboard, 21 .4 x 27 cm

Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern PKS Z 2144 224

26 . Untitled (Ohne Titel), c. 1937

Pastel on paper, 15.2 x 32.5 cm Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA

Gift of Mr. Theodore Racoosin, 1956.15 225

27 Attributed to Paul Klee, Geometric Spiral (geometrische Spirale), 1927

Pen, ink, and watercolor on paper, 22.9 x 17.9 cm Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA The Dorothy Braude Edinburg (Class of 1942) Collection, 1960.55 226

28 . Spook in the Butcher's Shop (Spuck in der Metzg), 1915/65 Pen on paper on cardboard, 12 x 13.3 cm Harvard Art Museums/Busch-Reisinger Museum

Gift of Virginia Herrick Deknatel, BR78.1 227

29 . Medley of Little People {allerlei kleines Volk), 1932/114 Pen on paper on cardboard, 31.2 x 48.3 cm Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA

Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Robert C. Osborn (Elodie Courter, Class of 1933), 1 991 .1 15 i-±T'\ L L* f 228

30 . The Moon os Toy {der Mond ols Spielzeug), 1940/140 Chalk on paper on cardboard, 29.7 x 21 cm

Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern

Livia Klee Donation, SLK Z 2619 iqJkL/w. AJELfiL

31 . The Witch with o Comb ( Die Hexe mit dem Komm ), 1922/101

Lithograph, trial proof, 28.8 x 21 cm

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston George Peabody Gardner Fund, 53.486

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Otis Norcross Fund, 56.104

231

33 . Chosen Boy {Auserwahlter Knabe), 1918/115

Pen and watercolor on primed linen on cardboard, 18.7 x 15.2 cm Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, South Hadley, MA

Anonymous loan, MH 2004. L3. 232

34 . Small World (Kleinwelt), 1914/120 Etching, 14.3 x 9.6 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, NY Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Fund, 403.1941 233

35 . Serpent's Prey (Schlangenbeute), 1926/211

Pen on paper on cardboard, 24.3 x 31 .6 cm

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

John H. and Ernestine A. Payne Fund, 59.199

36 . Printed Sheet with Pictures Bilderbogen ( ), 1937/133 Oil on canvas, 60 x 56.5 cm

The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC 0999 235

37. Scherzo with Thirteen ( Das Scherzo mit der Dreizehn), 1922/124

Oil transfer drawing, watercolor, ink, and pencil on paper on cardboard, 27.9 x 35.9 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, NY Purchase, 139.1951 236

38 . Musical Ghost (Musikalisches Gespenst), 1940/32 Pen on paper on cardboard, 29.6 x 21 cm

Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern PKSZ 2087 237

39. Man with a Tuba (Mann mit Tuba), 1929/213 Chalk on paper on cardboard, 32.9 x 21 cm

Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern PKSZ 719 238

40 . Concert on the Branch (Konzert auf dem Zweig), 1921/188 Pen on paper on cardboard, 28.2 x 22 cm

Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern PKS Z 469 239

41 . Absorption (Versunkenheit), 1919/113 Lithograph, 27 x 19.5 cm Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA

Gift of Professor and Mrs. John McAndrew, 1955.4 240

42 . No! (Neinl), 1940/39 Pen on paper on cardboard, 29.5 x 20.8 cm Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA

Anonymous gift, 1971.26 241

43 . Stick It Outl {durchhaltenl), 1940/337 Pastel on paper on cardboard, 29.6 x 20.9 cm

Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern PKS Z 2234 242

44 . Last Word in the Drama ( letztes Wort im Drama), 1938/359

Pen on paper on cardboard, 21 .5 x 27 cm

Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern

Livia Klee Donation, SLK Z 2475 243

45. A Gate (ein Tor), 1939/911

Tempera on primed paper on cardboard, 31 .6 x 14 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel

lnv.66.1 244

46 . Violence Gewolt ( ), 1933/138

Chalk on paper on cardboard, 17.1 x 20.9 cm

Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern PKS Z 1025 245

47. Accusation in the Street ( Anklage auf der Strasse), 1933/85 Chalk on paper on cardboard, 16.9 x 25 cm

Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern PKS Z 985 Z

246

48 . Manhunt (Intimate Scene) ( Menschenjagd [intime Scene]), 1933/123 Pencil on paper on cardboard, 20.2 x 32.4 cm

Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern PKS 1014 247

49 . Monhunt Menschenjagd ( ), 1933/115 Pencil on paper on cardboard, 23.2 x 32.3 cm

Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern PKS Z 1007 248

50. Double Murder (Doppe/ mord), 1933/211 Chalk on paper on cardboard, 32.9 x 20.9 cm

Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern PKS Z 1070 249

51 . Barbarian Mercenary Barbaren-Soldner 1933/145 ( ), Chalk on paper on cardboard, 20.9 x 32.9 cm

Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern PKS Z 1030 Z

250

52 . Militarism of Witches ( militarismus der Hexen ), 1933/329 Pencil on paper on cardboard, 23.2 x 27.3 cm

Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern PKS 1100 251

53. The Work of Art ( das Kunstwerk), 1933/154 Pencil on paper on cardboard, 23.8 x 19.8 cm

Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern

Livia Klee Donation, SLK Z 2414 252

54 . Emigrating (auswandern), 1933/181 Chalk on paper on cardboard, 32.9 x 21 cm

Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern PKS Z 1048 253

Yv-r,c\n. »

I &

,TU rW iA* *r>? w

• jfCr/JT/Vcf/*. V- ^

55. Comedian Komiker 1904/14 ( ), Etching and aquatint, 15.3 x 16.8 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, NY

Purchase, 331 .1941 254

56 . Candide, Chapter 24 ( Candide to Martin: You will at least allow that these people are

happy) ( Candide a Martin: vo us m'avouerez du moin, que ces gens-ci sont heureux), 191 1/87 Pen on paper on cardboard, 10.6 x 23.3 cm

Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern PKS Z 186

57. Candide, Chapter 30 [" From time to time, Pangloss would say to Candide: There is a chain of events... etc.") ("et Pan gloss disait quelquefois a Candide: tous les evenements-.-etc."), 1912/12 Pen on paper on cardboard, 15.7 x 23.1 cm

Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern PKS Z 197 255

58 . View of St. Germain (Ansicht v. St. Germain), 1914/41 Watercolor on paper on cardboard, 23 x 28.4 cm

Columbus Museum of Art, OH

Gift of Howard D. and Babette L. Sirak, the Donors to the Campaign for Enduring Excellence, and the Derby Fund, 1 991 .001 .033

59 . To Make Visible (sichtbar machen), 1926/66

Pen on paper on cardboard, 11 x 30.3 cm

Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern

Livia Klee Donation, SLK Z 2339 256

V « /

60. Eidolo: Erstwhile Philosopher (EIAQAA: weiland Philosoph), 1940/101 Chalk on paper on cardboard, 29.7 x 21 cm

Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern PKS Z 2128 257

61 . Death for the Idea (Der Tod fur die Idee), 1915/1

Ink on paper, 23.9 x 15.8 cm Harvard Art Museums/Busch-Reisinger Museum Museum purchase, BR52.11 258

62 . Polyphonic Architecture {polyphone Architektur), 1930/130 Watercolor and pen on cotton on canvas, 42.5 x 46.5 cm

Saint Louis Art Museum Museum purchase, 9:1942 5

259

63 . Roofs (After on Impression near the Milch Hous ) (Dacher [noch e. Impr. beim Milchhausl]), 1915/131

Watercolor on paper on cardboard, 21 .6 x 14.3 cm Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, South Hadley, MA

Anonymous loan, MH 2004. L3. 260

64. N. H. D (Province En-Aitch-Dee) (N. H. D. [provinz enhade]), ]932/247 Watercolor on paper on cardboard, 50.6 x 35.7 cm Harvard Art Museums/Busch-Reisinger Museum

Bequest of Virginia H. Deknatel in memory of Frederick Brockway Deknatel, 2009.4 ,

261

65. The Sublime Side postcard for "Bauhaus Exhibition Weimar 1923" ( Die erhabenen Seite, Postkarte zur "Bauhaus Ausstellung Weimar 1923"), 1923/47 Lithograph, 14.3 x 7.4 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, NY Purchase, 336.1942 262

f ' :«

1# « i v n soSskYi ]£&. 4 W\i/v \!

t*"»-

66 . City of Cathedrals (Stadt der Kathedralen), 1927/58 Pen on paper on cardboard, 30.5 x 46.4 cm Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA

Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Robert C. Osborn (Elodie Courter, Class of 1933), 1991.116 Index

A concepts, limitations of, 19, 103, 150, 153

cubism, 16, 135, 136-137, 143, 171, 187-189, 192, 194 abstract expressionism, 124 abstract painting, 91 D

Adorno, Theodor, 66, 112, 121

Aristotle, 55, 80-81, 152-153, 188-194 Deleuze, Gilles, 37, 43, 94 art Duchamp, Marcel, 173, 184

as deformation/distortion, 15, 17, 26, 30, 39, 59, 92,

105, 136, 137, 138, 146, 150, 152 E as genesis, 80-81, 140-142

as spatial, 32, 57, 58, 67, 80-81, 94, 100, 103, 104, Einstein, Albert, 189, 194

136, 137, 142, 145, 183-184, 192, 194 expressionism, 105, 106, 136, 165

as temporal, 18, 32, 58, 63-66, 80-81, 100, 135, 136, vs. impressionism, 135-148 142, 145, 183, 192

future of, 21, 63 F artist, the

imminent vs. transcendent, 157-163 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 184

way of life, 37 form vs. forming, 15, 27-28, 30, 49, 81 -82, 86, 150- 151 Augustine, 188, 191 G B Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 80-81, 83, 186

Bach, Johann Sebastian, 75, 94, 186 gesture, 125-126, 128-131 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 75 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 48, 52, 85, 90-91, 92, 139,

Benjamin, Walter, 19, 46, 66 - 73, 76, 186 178

Bergson, Henri-Louis, 187, 189 Gogh, Vincent van, 46, 67

Blaue Reiter, Der, 105, 138 ground, 16, 38, 89, 101, 159, 162-163 Boethius, 188 H c Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 46, 55, 59, 82, 188

Cassirer, Ernst, 190-192 Heidegger, Martin, 17-18, 20-21, 38-43, 47, 48, 81 -82,

Cezanne, Paul, 86, 138- 139, 141 - 142 135, 153, 189-196 childhood/childlike, 18,46, 105, 116, 124, 131-133, 154, hieroglyphs, 112, 116, 119, 121, 126

161, 170, 171, 172 Holderlin, Friedrich, 152 color theory, 32, 91, 138-140 human evolution, 87 263 9

Husserl, Edmund, 190, 192-193, 195 Clouds over BOR, 75

Collection of Doves, 1 7, 208 264 1 Collection of Figurines, 211 Comedian, 253

impressionism, 89, 103, 135-148, 186-187 ( Composition with Symbols ), 104, 163, 209

invisible, the, 17, 35, 37, 42, 52, 89, 172, 186, 195 Concert on the Branch , 27, 39, 96, 238

made visible, 16, 22, 23, 32, 33, 38-39, 48, 78-79, Cosmic and Earthly Time, 188

81 -82, 100, 101, 150, 153, 162, 165 Dance, Monster to my Soft Song!, 179- 180

Death and Fire, 18, 47, 57, 118 K Death for the Idea, 146, 163, 257 Double Murder, 39, 248

Kandinsky, Wassily, 19, 36, 59, 81 -82, 103, 105, 138, 139, Drawing Knotted in the Manner of a Net, 110, 119 166, 170 Dummies, 61 Kant, Immanuel, 56, 188-1 89, 193-194 Dynamic Density, 115 Klee, Paul Eidola: Erstwhile Cannibal, Man-Eater, 151

as musician, 93 Eidola: Erstwhile Philosopher, 2, 147, 151, 256 as teacher, 40, 49-50 Embrace, 124

attributed to Emigrating, 39, 81, 146, 252

Geometric Spiral, 29, 32, 146, 162, 225 Entertainer Festival, 39, 160, 221

works Entertainer in April, 39, 146, 160, 220

Absorption, 37, 79, 158, 170-171, 239 Fig Tree, 88-89

Accusation in the Street, 29, 39, 146, 245 Fish, The, 217

AdMarginem, 47, 102, 104, 111, 116-117 Fleeing Ghost, 174- 175

Ad Parnassum, 144 Flight, 30, 81, 147, 159, 223 Aged Phoenix, 136 Flora on the Rocks, 145

Agricultural Experimental Layout for Late Fall, 31, 73, Flowers in Stone, 1 1

204 From Gliding to Rising, 41, 95, 102, 146, 159, 216

Aliup, 29, 32, 205 Fugue in Red, 94

Alphabet I, 124-125 Garden in St. Germain, the European Quarter of Tunis,

Angel and the Distribution of Presents, The, 120 138 Angels, 137 Gate A, 102, 243 , 21, Angel's Care, 196 Ghost Chamber with the High Door (New Version),

Angelus Novus, 19, 20, 46, 66 172-173

Apparatus for the Magnetic Treatment of Plants, Gray Man and the Coast, The, 95

177-178 Green Terrain, 38, 81, 104, 199

Arabian Bride, 71 Group in Motion, 50, 78, 161, 222

Area of High Spirits, 145 Handbill for Comedians, 112, 145

Arrival of the Jugglers, 62 Hardly Still Walking, Not Yet Flying, 17, 18, 30, 41, At the Blue Bush, 46 83, 146, 159, 213

Barbarian Mercenary, 29, 30, 39, 146, 249 Harmony of Quadrilaterals in Red, Yellow, Blue, White, Bavarian Don Giovanni, The, 108 and Black, 143

Before the Gates of Kairouan, 138 Height!, 17

Bewitched and in a Hurry, 1 84 Hero with the Wing, The, 1 65

Blue Flower, 47-48 Heroic Roses, 20

Both of Them, 47, 210 Heroic Strokes of the Bow, 94

Boy in Fancy Dress, 1 44 High and Shining Stands the Moon, 108-109

Brewing Witches, 1 82 Highway and Byways, 143

Candide, Chapter 24, 1 07, 254 Hyperculture of Dynamo-radiolars 1, 20, 21

Candide, Chapter 30, 47, 107, 254 l-You-Earth-World, 17, 158

Carpet of Memory, 63-66 Illuminated Leaf, 90

Cat and Bird, 49 In the Kairouan Style, 138

Cathedral, 62 Individualized Measurement of Strata, 143

Child Consecrated to Suffering, 112-113, 118 Infernal Park, The, 176

Chosen Boy, 231 Inscription, 74

City of Cathedrals, 102, 109, 161,262 Insects, 163, 201 , 1 9

Inventions, 136-137 Soul Departs, The, 175-176

Jester in a State of Trance, 1 83 Specter of a Warrior, 173 Kettledrummer, 92, 94, 126-132, 145 Spellbound Lightning, 183 265 Landscape near E (in Bavaria), 1 1 Spirit of a Letter, 1 75 - 1 76

Landscapely-physiognomic, 89 Spiritualist Catastrophe, 169

Last Word in the Drama, 29, 14 7, 151, 242 Spook in the Butcher's Shop, 167-168, 226

Late Evening Looking Out of the Woods, 33, 206 Starving Spirits, 168, 174-175

Little Tree, 28-29, 37, 79, 89, 91, 102, 161, 207 Stick It Out!, 29, 147, 241

Lone Fir Tree, 89 Striding Man, 86

L-Platz under Construction, The, 75 Sublime Side, The, 31, 261

Lump Spirits, Wisp Spirits and Light Spirits (the Last Suicide on the Bridge, 27, 151, 163, 219

Very Fragmentary), 166-167 Superior Bird, 17, 41, 147, 214

Man with a Tuba, 237 Swinging, Polyphonic (and in Complementary Repeti-

Manhunt 29, 39, 40, 146, 247 tion), 196

Manhunt (Intimate Scene), 40, 246 Tablet of a Young Forest, 62 Materialized Ghosts, 172 Through a Window, 81-82

Medley of Little People, 40, 1 02, 227 Tightrope Walker, 17, 39, 46, 133, 146, 156, 160, Militarism of Witches, 39, 184, 250 218

Monument in Fertile Country, 143 Time, The, 47

Moon as Toy, The, 228 To Make Visible, 38, 57, 79, 100, 102, 108, 112,

Moonrise over St. Germain, 142 117, 162, 255

More Bird, 17, 102 Twittering Machine, The, 95-96, 180-181

Mr. Death, 167-168 Two Men Meet, Each Supposing the Other to Be of Musical Ghost, 95, 236 Higher Rank, 136

N. H. D (Province En-Aitch-Dee), 31, 75, 163, 260 Uneven Flight, 17, 41, 1 02, 147, 159, 212

No/, 41, 147, 240 Untitled (c. 1937), 38, 224

Nomad Mother, 230 Untitled (Grassy Slope Seen through Trees), 89

Old Fiddler, 126, 127 Untitled ( Landscape with Pond), 89

Once Risen from the Gray of Night, 108-109 Untitled (Last Still Life), 92

Order of High C, The, 1 12 Untitled (Single Tree on a Hill), 89

Pandora's Box as Still Life, 47 Untitled (Still Life), 1 1

Park near Lu[cerne], 87, 88, 114 View of St. Germain, 138, 255

Pastorale (Rhythms), 120 Villa R, 113, 114, 115

Perception of an Animal, 38, 202 Violence, 30,39, 146, 244

Phantom's Oath, 173, 175 Wall Plant, 2, 7-8, 29, 32, 200

Polyphonic Architecture, 31, 32, 73, 94, 196, 258 Waterbirds, 215 Polyphonic Currents, 46 Weathered Mosaic, 70, 74

Polyphony of Surfaces and Lines, 1 96 Wl (In Memoriam), 117

Printed Sheet with Pictures, 27, 30, 33, 54, 163, 234 Winged Hero, 136 Racing Somnambulist, 176 Witch with a Comb, The, 182, 229 Ragged Ghost, 174- 175 Witches' Sabbath, 182-183

Rhine at Duisburg, The, 114 Work of Art, The, 39, 251 Rhythmical, 96, 141 Young Tree (Chloranthemum), 89

Rhythmical, Stricter and Freer, 96 writings

Rider Unhorsed and Bewitched, 181-183 Bauhaus courses, 28, 40, 43, 81 -82, 139, 143, 145,

Roofs (After an Impression near the Milch Haus), 259 146 Saint from a Window, 21 "Creative Credo," 49, 79-80, 89, 91 -92, 93, 97

Scales of Twilight, The, 32-33, 39, 114, 149, 163, Nature of Nature, The, 49, 88-89

203 "On Modern Art," 9-14, 25, 89, 92 Scherzo with Thirteen, 95, 162, 235 Pedagogical Sketchbook, 152, 154 Sea-Snail King, 96 Tagebucher, 49

Semi-circle with Angular Features, 144 Thinking Eye, The/Das bildnerische Denken, 85, 89,

Serpent's Prey, 118-119, 233 140 Small World, 40, 232 "Ways of Studying Nature," 89 Somnambulic Dancer, 179 Kooning, Willem de, 91 L T 266 language, 25-27, 57, 105-134 technology, 21, 72, 192 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 56, 57-58, 100, 183 temporality, 185-196

line, the, 22-23, 28-29, 31, 46, 53, 86, 100, 107, 115, 137, Thoreau, Henry David, 91, 129

146-147, 151, 154, 155, 161-162, 192-194 Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 196 V

M Valery, Paul, 92

Marc, Franz, 16, 49, 93, 105, 138, 140, 157- 158, 166, 169 w Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 21 -22, 39, 52, 58, 60, 85-97, 138,

193 word and image, 56, 107, 108, 111, 127, 149, 151, 152, 174 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 93-94, 186 word as image, 58

music, 27, 32, 46, 51,54, 58, 85,93-98, 112, 113, 117, 129, writing, 38, 55-56, 102, 107-108, 113-123, 150-151

135-148, 151, 162, 185-186, 188, 192, 194 Z N Zizek, Slavoj, 194

Nazism, 126, 130, 132, 146, 184 neuroscience, 113-119, 121-123

Newton, Isaac, 189

Nietzsche, Friedrich, 58, 153 Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), 47-54, 55, 60 o

outsider art, 131

physis, 48, 55, 81, 160

Picasso, Pablo, 71, 188-189

Plato, 35, 36, 55, 93, 152 Platonism, 86

point, the, 28-29, 31, 46, 53, 155

pointillism, 32, 82-83

rhythm, 94-95, 96-97, 136-137, 140-147

Ricoeur, Paul, 192

Rilke, Rainer Maria, 36, 77-80, 142 romanticism, 90, 92-93, 160-161 Ruskin, John, 64, 65

Saussure, Ferdinand de, 121

Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 49, 90, 150, 152

Schopenhauer, Arthur, 169

simultaneity, 26-27, 32, 57, 58, 63, 94, 141, 145, 155, 171,

174, 183, 185-196

Socrates, 1 8, 35 Contributors

MARIA DEL ROSARIO ACOSTA is currently associate profes- der Welt: Heidegger—Gadamer— Fink (2007); Annaherungen sor and head of the graduate program at the Department of an Platon (2009); Die Sprache der Philosophie (2011); and

Philosophy at the Universidad de los Andes, Bogota. Since 2006, I m Angesicht des Unendlichen: Zur Metaphysikkritik Nietzsches she has authored seven books on topics including German roman- (2011 ). His most recent research project is on the foundation of ticism, Friedrich Schiller, Hegel, contemporary philosophy of art, metaphysics in Plato's philosophy. and contemporary political philosophy. Some of her latest publica- CLAUDE CERNUSCHI is professor of art history at Boston tions include a translation of lectures by John Sallis on philosophy College. He has authored Jackson Pollock: "Psychoanalytic" and art (La mirada de las cosas: el arte como provocacion ) (2008) Pollock: Significance and philosophical volume on Paul Klee Paul Klee: fragmentos de Drawings (1992); Jackson Meaning and a ( (1993); "Not an Illustration but the Equivalent": A Cognitive mundo She is preparing an introductory guide to modern ) (2009). Approach to Abstract Expressionism Re/Casting philosophy of art; a compilation on the subject of law, violence, (1997); Kokoschka: Ethics and Aesthetics, Epistemology and Politics and contemporary political philosophy; and a book on Hegel and in Fin-de-Siecle Vienna and Barnett Newman and community. She has been awarded a Humboldt postdoctoral fel- (2002); Heideggerian Philosophy He has also contributed essays lowship for 201 3. (2012). to Oskar Kokoschka: Early Portraits from Vienna and Berlin

CLAUDIA BARACCHI is professor of moral philosophy at the (2002); Birth of the Modem: Style and Identity in Vienna 1900

Universita di Milano-Bicocca. She is the author of Of Myth, Life, (2011); and the following McMullen Museum publications: and War in Plato's Republic (2002) and Aristotle's Ethics as First Edvard Munch: Psyche, Symbol and Expression (2001 ); Matta: Philosophy (2008/2011), as well as various articles on Greek Making the Invisible Visible (2004); Cosmophilia: Islamic Art philosophy, the philosophy of history, and contemporary debates from the David Collection (2006); A New Key: Modern Belgian ranging from classical phenomenology, the thought of the feminine, Art from the Simon Collection (2007); Pollock Matters (2007); and psychoanalysis. Her most recent works focus on the Persian- and Mystic Masque: Semblance and Reality in Georges Rouault

Arabic reception of Aristotle and the Peripatetics; issues in politi- (2008). cal philosophy; and the intertwined questions of theater, embodi- ELIANE ESCOUBAS is emeritus professor of philosophy at the ment, and ontology, paradigmatically in Gilles Deleuze and Jerzy University of Paris-Est/ Creteil. Titles of her major publications Grotowski. She is a co-founder of the Ancient Philosophy Society. include: Imago Mundi—Topologie de I'art L'Esthetique Among her current projects are a book-length research on the (1986); L'Espace pictural and Questions hei- archaic experience of nature and a work on the question of war in (1995); (1995/2011); deggeriennes (Stimmung, logos, traduction, poes/e) She the reflections of Plato and Freud. (2010). is the translator of Husserl's Recherches phenomenologiques pour

DAMIR BARBARIC has been professor of history of philosophy la constitution (1982) and editor of "Art et phenomenologie" in at Zagreb University since 1992. He has held guest professor- La Part de I'CEil (1991). Her current scholarly research interests ships in philosophy at Universitat Wien, Universitat Freiburg, and are on phenomenology, German philosophy, aesthetics and phi-

Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin. He was a guest researcher at losophy of arts (painting and poetry), and Daseinsanalysis. Universitat Tubingen and the Bavarian Academy of Science and GUNTER FIGAL is professor of philosophy at Universitat Freiburg. is an honorable member of the Slovenian Philosophical Society has president of the Martin-Heidegger-Gesellschaft and the Sokratische Gesellschaft. He has authored nineteen He been since 2003. He was Gadamer Distinguished Visiting Professor at books and some two hundred papers, studies, and reviews in Boston College in senior fellow at the Freiburg Institute both local and international publications, and has edited sixteen 2008 and for Advanced Studies, School of Language and Literature in volumes. Some titles of his books in German include: Aneignung 267 2009/2010. He is author of numerous publications on top- Transfigurements: On the True Sense of Art (2008); and Logic of ics in phenomenology, hermeneutics, and aesthetics includ- Imagination (2012). He has held numerous fellowships and in ing: Martin Heidegger: Phanomenologie der Freiheit (2000); 2006 received an honorary doctorate from Universitat Freiburg.

Gegenstandlichkeit: Das Hermeneutische und die Philosophie He is a regular visiting professor at Staffordshire University and (2006, Portuguese 2007, Hungarian 2009, English 2010, at Universitat Freiburg. Italian 2012); Verstehensfragen: Studien zur phanomenologisch-

DENNIS J. SCHMIDT is liberal arts professor of philosophy, hermeneutischen Philosophie (2009); and Erscheinungsdinge: comparative literature, and German at The Pennsylvania Asthetik als Phanomenologie (2010). State University. He is the author of The Ubiquity of the Finite:

CHARLES W. HAXTHAUSEN is Robert Sterling Clark Professor Hegel, Heidegger, and the Entitlements of Philosophy (1988); of Art History at Williams College. He is author of Paul Klee: Experience: On Germans and Other Greeks (2001); Tragedy

The Formative Years (1981), co-editor (with Heidrun Suhr) of and Ethical Life (2001 ); Lyrical and Ethical Subjects: Essays on Berlin: Culture and Metropolis (1990), and editor of The Two the Periphery of the Word, Freedom, and History (2005); and Art Histories: The Museum and the University (2002). His most Between Word and Image: Heidegger, Gadamer, and Klee on recent project is Sol LeWitt: The Well-Tempered Grid, an exhi- Gesture and Genesis (2012). He has co-edited Hermeneutische bition he curated for the Williams College Museum of Art (fall Wege (2000) and The Difficulties of Ethical Life (2008). He

2012). He is currently completing a book on the art criticism of is also the editor of the SUNY Press Series in Contemporary

Carl Einstein with selected translations. In 2009 he received the Continental Philosophy. College Art Association's Award for the Distinguished Teaching is professor of philoso- of Art History. MARCIA SA CAVALCANTE SCHUBACK phy at Sodertorn University. She has also worked as associate

JEFFERY HOWE is professor of fine arts at Boston College, professor at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. She specializing in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century is the author of the following monographs: O comeco de de us: European art as well as American architecture. Recent books A filosofia do devir no pensamento tardio de Schelling (1998); include: The Houses We Live In: An Identification Guide to the A doutrina dos sons de Goethe a caminho da musica nova de History and Style of American Domestic Architecture (2002) Webern (1999); Para ler os medievais: Ensaio de hermeneutica and Houses of Worship: An Identification Guide to the History imaginativa (2000); Lovtal till intet: essaer om filosofisk herme- and Style of American Religious Architecture (2003). He has neutik (2006); Olho a olho: ensaios de longe (2010); and Aft curated and edited the catalogues of several exhibitions for the tanka i skisser (2011). She has translated several works of phi-

McMullen Museum, including: Edvard Munch: Psyche, Symbol losophy into Portuguese, including Heidegger's Being and Time. and Expression (2001 ); Fernand Khnopff: Inner Visions and Her field of research focuses on phenomenology, hermeneutics, Landscapes (2004); and A New Key: Modern Belgian Art from German idealism, and hermeneutical readings of ancient philos- the Simon Collection (2007). ophy. Her current research is on the in-between as a hermeneutical category to grasp the loss of grounds as common ground. GALEN A. JOHNSON is honors professor of philosophy at the University of Rhode Island and general secretary of the ALEJANDRO ARTURO VALLEGA is assistant professor of philoso-

International Merleau-Ponty Circle. He has been a recent phy at the University of Oregon. He is the author of Heidegger recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the and the Issue of Space: Thinking On Exilic Grounds (2003) and

Humanities and the American Philosophical Society. He is editor Sense and Finitude: Encounters at the Limits of Art, Language, of The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting and the Political (2009). He is head editor for Latin America of (1993) and, most recently, has authored The Retrieval of the the World Philosophies Series published by Indiana University Beautiful: Thinking Through Merleau-Ponty's Aesthetics (2010). Press. His work focuses on aesthetics, Latin American philosophy,

His current research interests include, in addition to Paul Klee, a and decolonial thought. Before beginning his career in philoso- study of Merleau-Ponty's poetics and a study of the sublime and phy, Vallega was formally trained as a painter at the BFA pro- the baroque in Merleau-Ponty's theory of painting. gram of the Massachusetts College of Arts and Design and has

continued to work privately, keeping studios in the United States DAVID FARRELL KRELL is emeritus professor of philosophy at and Italy. DePaul University, Chicago. He is the author of twelve books of philosophy and the translator/editor of another eight. His own STEPHEN H. WATSON is professor of philosophy at the philosophical work focuses on the areas of German romanti- University of Notre Dame and has published on a variety of cism and idealism, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and figures and topics in Continental philosophy. His books include: Derrida. His two most recent academic books are a transla- Extensions: Essays On Interpretation, Rationality, and the Closure tion and critical edition of Holderlin's Der Tod des Empedokles of Modernism (1992); Tradition(s) I: Refiguring Community

(2008). Krell has published short stories and three novels, and at and Virtue in Classical German Thought (1997); Tradition(s) II: the moment is working on two stage plays. Hermeneutics, Ethics, and the Dispensation of the Good (2002); Crescent Moon over the Rational: Philosophical Interpretations

JOHN SALLIS is Frederick J. Adelmann Professor of Philosophy of Paul Klee (2009); In the Shadow of Phenomenology: Writings at Boston College. He is the author of more than twenty After Merleau-Ponty I (2009); and Phenomenology, Institution books. Among his more recent books are: Shades—Of Painting and History: Writings After Merleau-Ponty II (2009). at the Limit (1998); Force of Imagination (2000); On Translation (2002); Topographies (2006); The Verge of Philosophy (2008); McMullen Museum of Art Boston College

ISBN 978- 1-892850- 19-5

9 781 892 850195 >